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A bstract
for a detailed anaiysis of the poetry. Form emerges as a main concem. They each
develop architecturai metaphors in their discourse regarding other poets and
matters of craft, technique, and voice, but also, in an extended fashion, use it to
address broader cultural issues such as language. In chapter two, which traces the
notion of 'home' in the poetry, an awareness of architecture as an expressive
entity capable of suggesting an almost organic inner life emerges. On occasion.
they also reveal a deep ambivalence toward built structures. Chapter three
examines their handling of the estate house in the light of traditional
representations, leading to a focus on other architectural sites which carry strong
historical resonances for each p e t . The final chapter continues this inquiry in
relation to the presiding notion of mernory. the genre of elegy, homage, and the
idea of mimetic 'poetic architecture.' Spatial imagery becornes crucially linked
w i th remembrance. In conclusion, architecture in the writing of Heaney
and
Walcott does not consist merely of static fonns. but is responsive to the animating
forces of poetic language, continuaily evoking the fluidity of time.
Acknowledements
I wish to acknowledge the generous financial support of the School of
Chamberlin. for his guidance. enthusiasm, and willingness to act as a soundingboard for my ideas. They were always given back to me enriched. and nuanced in
challenging ways. My cornmittee. Professors John Reibetanz and Rick Greene.
provided invaluable assistance throughout the writing process. Sincere thanks to
my external examiner. Jeffery Donaldson, for his astute reading. Lovers of poetry
al1 three. 1 hope that you continue to be loved in tum. Thanks to Sharon Walton.
Ceciiia Martino. Deborah Esch. Carol Percy, JoAnna Dutka, Michael Dixon. and
Rick Asals from the University of Toronto English Department.
1 also wish to extend my heartfelt thanks and love to my wonderful family for
frisndship and editing assistance. Thanks to Sharon Howe, Dave Salm. and al1 my
New Zealand. Canadian. and American fnends. in particular Chris Jennings.
Michael Saenger. Rachel Weider. and Rodney Ast. Finally. 1 rvish to pay tribute to
my beautiful soulmate and long-suffenng editor. Tanya Wood. for helping me so
much. 1 feel a profound sense of gratitude for the joy and inspiration you have
given me over the years. 1 love you.
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter One1 Reading Architecture in Heaney
Works Consulted
Abbreviations
Crediting Poetry
Door irtto the Durk
Deaih of u Ncrtirrulist
Field Work
The Governrtienr of the Tongire
Tite Huw Lanrern
North
Preoccrtpations
T k Pluce of Wriring
The Redress of Poetc
Sweenq Astruy
Stution Island
TIze Spirit Level
Seeing Tizings
Wintering Oitt
CP
DD
DN
FW
GT
rn
N
P
PW
RP
SA
SI
SL
ST
WO
Derek Walcott:
Another Lue
The Arkansas Tesrument
The Bounty
The Cactuwuy
The Fortrrnute Truveiler
The Girlf
in u Green Night
Midsuntriter
Orrreros
The Star Apple Kingdom
Seu Grupes
Whut the Twilight S m s
AL
AT
B
C
FT
G
lGN
M
O
SAK
SG
WTS
Introduction
The world is far from static. In a way it cornes into k i n g through the very
chaotic confrontation of oneself and the material world. through the
interpenetration of livring beings and the sensual exuberance of nature.
-Brandon LaBel le
Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott have long maintained a personal
friendship. They are colleagues in a literary sense as well: each has commented on
the other's work. Heaney has compared Walcott to J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats.
metaphorical exchange. and Walcott also suggests that Heaney casts the
component parts of words into an organic arrangement, a natural spatialization.
(1979):5-1 1.
3 Dcrck Walcott, "An Inlcn.ic\v with Dcrck Wrilcott." by Da\-id Montcncgro. l'urrisu~tRuvirw 57 ( 19%)):
21 1- 12. Rpr, William Bacr, cd. Coni?rrsarionswith I&rek IValcm (Jackson: UP of Mississippi. 1%):
147. Scc d s o an unpubltshcd mss. tvhich dctriils a \.kit t o Ircland to shy \vith Hcancy in thc Fishcr
2
links they have in common beyond their friendship.
While architecture, as Herbert Read contends, is the "art of enclosing space,"
poetry is the art of enclosing language. thus enabling it to sing across tirne.'
Architecture and poetry have long been the subject of corn parison, and Walcott's
words recall Ben Jonson's view of Ianguage in his Discoveries. "The congruent.
and harmonious fitting of parts in a sentence, hath almost the fastning. and force
of knirting. and connexion: As in Stones well squar'd. which will rise strong a
great way without rnortar."j Maken in each field share the desirr for felicitous
design. They also share a concem with f o m in its various capacities. The Greek
word poiesis. or -making,' relates poetry to architecture on the primary level of
fom: a poem. like a building. is conceived according to a plan. however
unconscious or improvised. This is an inquiry into architectural images and
metaphors in Heaney's and Walcott's poetry and poetics. 1 pursue a critical
reading that examines the role architecture plays in their verbal designs; they use
architecture to engage questions of memory and history.
Iapproach the question of architecture in the work of Heaney and Walcott
from five related angles. Fom is the fint of these. creating a bond with other
makers and artists, as well as poets and architects. Second. the imagery Heaney
manipulation is thc csscncc of architectural dcsipn. \r,hcthcr that manipulation is Cor rcasons OC nccd.
structure. o r dcsign." But p o c t q manipulatcs both s p c c and iimc in thc a h t n c t and in t c s t u d maicrialit>..
Scc Jamcs F. O'Gorman. M I C (/Arc-liifecfrcru (Philarlclphia: U of P c n n s y l ~ m i r P.
i 1%) 3.
5 Q t d in A. W. Johnson, neri Jartron: POPIC and A r c I ~ i ~ e ~ l(Oxford:
tcr~
Clarendon. 1994) 33. S c c afso John
Ruskin. '/lie Severi Imrips of Arc-lrifuc-lrtre(Ncw York: Crmrcl I. 1880): Manin Hcidcggcr. I'otrrry.
I m i , p r r c r , ~ ~Iiorrglir.
.
i r a s - Al bcrt HolstaLlcr (Ncnr York: Hrupcr. 1 9 7 1): Anthony C. Antoniridcs. /:PicSpcrc-e: lownrti rlrr Rmrs of IVesturt~Art-iiirecf~cre(Ncu York: Van Nmtrand Rcinhold, 1 W-): For r c l a i d
rcriJ i ngs scc Nci l Lcach. cd.. I<urlritrkiri,g Archireclurr :A Rrc~drriri Citlr~trd'Iirory ( Ltmdon m d Ncu. Y o r k
Routlcdgc. 1997).
3
architecture acts as an extended rnetaphor for personal and cultural issues in their
work. The fourth takes into account the mimetic notion of 'poetic architecture.'
The final angle is provided by a concem with the role of poetic voice. which
Heaney and Walcott each repeatedly associate with architecture. These factors
inform the thematic focus of each chapter. whose content 1 outline at the end of
the introduction.
Heaney and Walcott create. as al1 poets (and architects) must, through what
C. K. Williams calls the "necessities of form." These are the "generative factors"
that "take us places we wouldn't be able to go othenvise: i f s fom which allows
us to move into the unique kind of consciousness poetry inspires. to be a bit
possessed [. .-
4
taking into account the symbiotic relationship between form and content in the
poetry of Heaney and Walcott.9 Their use of architecture highlights this
association.
Carruth also makes the historical distinction between form and style which he
contends existed from Goethe to T. S. Eliot: "Form has meant the poem's outer.
observable. imitable, and more or less static rnatenality; style has meant its inner
quality. essentially hidden and unanalyzable. the properties that bind and move
and individuate."io He argues for a fusion of these elernents into a single notion
The architectural thus becomes a crucial site relating to any new beginning. as the
master trope of artistic self-formation. Ellen Eve Frank identifies four fields where
architecture is an analogue: the body, the mind. memory. and literature. But it is
9 C m r h nom: "IL mcans thc ivholc pocm. nothing Icss. [... 1 Lhc rom is ~ h pocm."
c
Scc Haydcn Carnith,
Sc.ltxrrti /.Ssuy.s and Rtwiews (Port Townscnd, WA: C o p p c r Canyon, 1%)
168.
10 Carruth 167.
1 1
1W)
-16.
largely in connection with art that her ideas touch on the flow between foms
that Heaney and Wdcott invoke. Frank argues:
Pater. Hopkins, Proust. and James choose architecture as their art analogue
for literature in part because it is the art fonn most capable of embodying
thought-spirit, or essences, most capable of the conversion act. These four
writers cal1 the conversion activity translation; we may think of it also as
tram-formation, or one art forni into another, of being into embodied
being. 12
Heaney and Walcott share the transformative urge. Alongside their reading of
architecture. allusive relations to other arts and occupations involving skilled
design such as sculpting, painting, and music become a means of drawing f o m
into a continuum within their poetics.
Examples of architecture read as a language are common. James O'Gorman
cal 1s architecture an extremely flexible "form of language. of communication. It
speaks. Lt can convey through its design its place in society. its content." He adds
1 2 El lcn E\T Frank. /jrt.rnp Archilucfrrrt.:l3.wq-s roivards a Trndirion: lVnlrvr Pater. Gerald MrrrikjHopkit~s.Marcel Prorcsr. Henry Jmnus (Bcrkclc>.: U of Cal ifornia P. 1979) 1 3- 13.
13 O'Gorman 89. 98.Hc uscs thc csamplc of CIassicism in thc design of the Washington ,Mail to illustratc
thc idcri of srylistic continuity. stating that thc buildings "rcisc imaginati\,cly out of thc riccurnulatcd
rncanings cmbcddcd in rhc inhcritcd fonns of thc past." O'Goman 95.
14 Ruskin 10.
6
In the hands of Heaney and Walcott architectural imagery often becomes an
extended rnetaphor that relates to language, historical and political issues, and the
often ambivalent feelings each poet has regarding his place in the world. The
notion of memory is central. As Phillipe Hamon declares, "memory is [. ..j a
f unction of architectural spaces. places that haunt the collective unconscious." In
the sarne mode. architectural mernories corne to haunt "that other collective
unconscious. which is language." Both Heaney and Walcott sec words as forms
which preserve "traces of specific places." Hamon daims that language acts as
the "natural conservator of national heritage."lj As Walcott's Shabine suggests.
words can contain the enormous "pain of history."l6 In the writing of Heaney
and Walcott the architectural nearly always expresses an underlying rneaning.
The transference, through imagery. of buil t structures into poetry 's unique order
of representation allows them to be figured-forth in newly imagined ways.
This process can further involve matters of f o m . and the notion of poetic
architecture. Traditiondl y, poetry has been placed in imagined cornpetition with
the archi tectural. as in the "uere peretinius" topos of Horace's -'Exegi
rnonumentum [. .. 1" ode. This provides the oldest argument: "1 have completed a
rnernorial more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal grave of the
pyrarnids. that neither biting rain nor the north wind in its fury can destroy nor
the unnumbered series of years and the flight of ages."i7 As David Cowling
States. the tradition involves viewing the "textual 'building' itself as a finished
n u s Giarnbattistri Vico's thcon. thar archaic familics of siens sun.i\x in tvords. Thcsc a b o r i g i d mcanings
arc likc prchisroric objccts rccovcnblc from middcns. likc ihc Dcid Sca Scroils. wcapms. kitchcn urcnsils.
figurines ol' gcddcsscs. Joycc worc dl his books as piirnpscsts orverobjccts in this miJJcn. rind cl-cntuall>.
ovcr his 0n.n tvork." Guy Davcnprt. Evrry h r t - e Evolves (1 Fonn: '/ivenry f 3 s n y (SanFrancisco: Sorth
Point. IW)60.
1 Dcrck Wdcott. 'Thc Schooncr FIiglr~."T.ru Srcrr Apple Ki~igdotn( 1979; London: Capc. 1 m)12.
1 H o r - c . 'liu Tirird fjoorl:of Hortlc-e 's 'Odes,' 30. 149. 11. 1-5. trms. G. Williams. Qtd. in David
Cotvl i ng, Ilirildin,q the I'ext: Archiluclriru as Metaphor in Inre Medievol nrd En* Modern /.icrri<-u ( O sTord:
Clarendon. 19%) 142.
7
product of beauty andlor resilience and permanence." More than 'imitation.' in
the case of Heaney and Waicott, a formal "gestunng" is often involved, one of
the original meanings of 'mimesis' in the Greek.l*The idea remains powerful in
their work, as my chapter on elegy explores, as it does in various works where the
"architectural concept." as A. W. Johnson wntes of Jonson. is '"tum[ed]"'
to
"apply to poetry."] 9
through the rooms of an imagined structure helped the rnind's recall. Heaney
makes a strong connection of architecture with voice, as well as Walcott. due to
the association of sites and structures with various poets-such as Yeats and his
tower at Ballylee. Voice, in poetic ternis. is not prirnarily a reference to speech. but
to individual tone and diction. that combination of factors a poet discovers
Brogan. cd. 3.
iih Hcancy and Waiott, Jonson's onccption of languagc is couchcd in architcturil mctliphors. Bur
Johnson rrrgucs rhai Jonson cartics this furthcr. sccing thc fashion in which ihc "disposition of thrit
Iringurigc in a p m rcscrnblcs thc disposition o f an architccturil plan. anci thc p w t is likc a rnrxii architcct.
[... 1 Jonscin actually 'tums' architcrunl conccpts so thsit ihcy apply to p o c i ~ . "Johnson 33-34.
Zn Hamon 4. S c c for background Frmccs A-Yatcs, The Arf of Merrtory (Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1%).
2 1 I L is rclatcd t o thc Anstotclian ef/ios-originating \.oicc csprcssivc of poctic inicntion. and organizcr of
pcrsonac-bchind thc voicc of-thc silcn t mcdi tting pocr, addrcssing an riudicncc. and 01- pcrsonri T. S. Eliot
asscrts in "Thc Thrcc Voiccs d Pociv." Scc Fabian Gudas ruid Michel Divison, "Voicc." Brogm, cd. 33738.
39
Sec Jacques Dcnida, O/C;rtrnrnalnlo,py. inns. Gayalri C h h v o r t . Spivak. Rcv. cd. ( 1Y76: Bal ti morc:
Johns Hopkins UP. 1%).
1
19 As
--
\\
8
privilege writing while at the same time bracketing poetic voice as a medium of
tonal truth. Acting as a metaphor for linguistic and personal identity, the
subliminal design of voice announces a presence in poetic language in a way that
complements, yet supersedes, the notions of style and rthos. Voice marks a key
aspect for Heaney and Walcoa, not only in the "metaianguage" provided by
architecture each uses to talk about poetry, but in the verse itself.23
My thesis argues that architecture functions in a number of capacities as both
Gaston Bachelard suggests in The Poetics of Spuce that ail "really inhabited
space bears the essence of the notion of home." He contends "the houses that
were lost forever continue to live on in us (... 1 they insist in us in order to live
again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living."zs That
"supplernent" is discernible in Heaney and Walcott's p o e t l in the way that the
family house becomes an underlying figure in memory of dislocation and loss.
Some awareness of the architecture in Heaney's and Walcott's early lives and
their countries is thus important in relation to the role of architecture in their
23 Cf. Hamm's pro\ucarivc rcmrirks: "Ir is by m a s of architccturc thal thc ~ c x bcgins
r
t o spcak OP \\.ha1
basicdly dcrincs it ris ri srmcrurc. as a ficrion. o r s 3 stnicturcd fiction. AI1 architccrurc in lircrdturc thus
bccomcs to a grcatcr or Icss dcgcc. an incorpratcd mclalmguagc." Hamon 24-25.
2-1 Cl'. Paul dc Man's sratcrncnt: "poctic langurrgc is not r d 1y oricntcd toward spacc. but ultirnatcl y tcnvard
timc." hul dc Mm. "Spacccritics: J. Hillis Millcr and Joscph Frank." Criliml 1Vrilin.q~.1953-1978. cd.
LIndsriy Watcrs (iMinncpcdis: U of Minnesota P. 1 9 8 9 ) 1 14.
25 Gaston Bachclard. Thc P0efir.r of S p r e . trans. Maria Jolas ( 1964: Boston: Bcacon. 1994) 5. 95. Cf. his
wmmcnr: "o\w and bcyond o u r mcmorics. the housc 1i.c wcrc boni in is physic-di?. in-wnbcd in us. I t is a
p u p of organic habits." Bachclard 14.
as Frank McDonaid says. reveals the way the Irish vemacular tradition has been
rejected due to the association with "poverty, dispossession and the Farnine."29
Yet Heaney draws on an architectural heritage richer than this assessrnent would
allow, stretching back to the 4000-year old prehistoric burial site in Phoenix Park,
Dublin. Passage-graves like Boyne emerge as recurrent sources of imagery in his
poems.
F o m the founding of Dublin by the Vikings in 841, through the growth of
monastenes and the arriva1 of the round tower near the end of the first millennium.
10
Derek Walcott was born in 1930. at 17 Chaussee Road in Castries. St. Lucia.
30 Scc for brickpround Morris Craip. 'Tire Arc-llifectlrru o/lrcfrrrtd: Frorra f/tr I-nlrh~sfTitncs IO I88O
(London: Briwford. 1982).
3 Scc S c i h O'Rcilly, "Architccturc in [rcland Prior to 1900." Bcckcr. c t al. c h . 11-16. Scc d s o Matthcw
J. McDcrmotl, /rrlurid's Ardti~rcfurulHerifugr: A t Orrflitw Hisroq- (Dublin: Folcns, 1 Y75).
3 2 Scrin Rothcq. "Ircland and the New Archtccturc 1 W - l W O .Bcckcr.
~
ct al. cs. 17.
33 Sirncin Walkcr, "Archiicclurc in Irclmd. 1930-1975." Bcckcr. c l ai. c h . 3.
3-1 Simon Wslkcr. "From Concrctc io Conicstunlism: lrish Architccturc 1970-1995," Bcckcr. ct al. cds.
29.
35 Wal kcr. "Concrctc." Bcckcr. c t al. cds. 33.
11
one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles.36 The mainly wooden house.
now converted into a printer's shop and with its front veranda removed, has a
steeply pitched roof and three louvered windows on the second floor. Built in a
decorous mixture of picturesque and formal styles. its unassuming demeanour
belies the fact that it survived when four-fifths of Castries burnt to the ground in
1918 (for the fifth time). Walcott Square-fomerly Columbus Square. but renamed
square 1 reflect some apparent French influence."37 St. Lucia changed hands
thirteen times between the British and French over the course of its history. The
hybrid architectural f o m s of Castries now reflect the multicultural origins of its
inhabitants past and present. West Indian architecture commonly seems an
incongruous and eclectic mixture of styles, at least to outsiders. Crain observes
how churches in Castries mix "medieval and classical details." and describes
Govemment House as an "eclectic combination of details." featuring both
Palladian windorvs and Demarara shutters.38 A large range of influences (and use
of vivid colors) is visually apparent in St. Lucian and West Indian architecture.
Some of this eclecticism emerges in Walcott's poetry. successfully integrated into
-3sCmin
1 8 8 . 104-5.
3 9 P ~ r n c l aW. Gtmcr. Ciiribbutrn Grorgiriri: Tire Grcrnr nrrd Sm111 Horrsrs O/ flir CVesr Inclius ( Washington.
DC: Thrcc Contincn~s,1W-)56. Shc brritcs of Jarncs Gibbs (1682-1754): 'Through his Book of
,-rdtire~-rrrrr.
publishcd in 17B. Gibbs had a grmtcr influcncc o n both prcnPincidBritish and colonid
rirchiiccturc in the 18th ccntuq- than any othcr crrchitcct ( ..-1. Bcsidcs its adaptability. thc mslarion of this
s ~ d tco ihc cofonics \\.asr n d c pcxsiblc by thc nrirurc of Gibbs's book. This was thc first architcturzrl book
dcsigncd as a hot\.-to-do-it manual. or buildcr's handbook. [... 1 it \sas scmn l~cdlosvcdb\. a vcrihblc floorl of
sirnilar handixwks." Gosncr 18. Colonists modificd dcsigns to suit tropical conditions.
12
cultural imperative seems at work in the importation of these books. extendible to
the way forma1 languages in literary and architectural senses achieved translation
in the islands. From the mid-eighteenth century. Gosner notes. West Indian
colonists were using "the classical vocabulary of architecture easily and
gracefully. but wi th a defi ni te Creole accent." a resilient "tropical Georgian."4o
But African slaves built the forts, Great Houses, churches and sugarcane-milling
factories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. a fact remembered in
Walcott's Onieros. Most of St. Lucia's plantation buildings are now destroyed,
and the threat is now commercial development.-il This is a point Walcott takes up
in poetry and prose, as my first chapter raises. dong with his views on the rise of
The issue of architecture in Heaney and Walcott has not gone unnoticed by
critics. With regard to Heaney, Neil Corcoran, Michael Parker. Henry Hart, Stan
Smith. Michael Molino. and Steven Matthews are useful in this area. Corcoran
notes that '-Heaney's Demy is the best-known instance of rural representation in
post-Yeatsian lrish poetry." and draws attention to his inhentance of Kavanagh.
Montague. and Fallon's '-ways of reading Irish rural experience." But as 1 argue
in regard to both poets. not only is the land "densely recessive. a script which
knowledge c m teach the p e t ro read," but architecture as well.42 Parker
broaches a theme which will be explored in the second chapter, how Heaney
early on "discovered in language and literature. and the 'tongue's / old
-10 Gosncr 20.
Hcncc ihc grcnvth of hcritsigc prcscnxtion mo\.cmcnts to protcct historiai architccturc from dcrnolition.
Cf. ihc ironic commcnt of Eugenio Pkrcz Mont&.. an archi tcct from thc Domi n i u n Rcpublic: "Archi tccw
c m bc ivorsc t h m hurricruics that Jcstroy historic buildings-" Lisannc Rcnncr. "Archirccturd Rcsiorations
Gloriy thc Hisroncs of Caribbcan Islands." Orlmdo Sertfinel-Qtd. in Eugcnio P6rcz Montiis. CnNmos:
hfor~~rrr~rr~~.s
w d Sites of the Greuter Curi/)beari(Santo Domingo: Casas R d c s . 199) 39.
42 NciI Corcoran. A f i r Yeats at~dJoy-e:
Rendhg Modern Irish Ijfernttm (Oxford: -lord UP, 1997) 69.
67.68.Scc dx, Ncil Corcorm. Semtics Hmr- (London: Fabcr, 1%)4[
13
dungeons'. a surrogate home." T h e "supplement of living" Bachelard remarks
upon in regard to home finds its conelative here, though the cornparison is stated
in negative terms. Home (and language) appear as incarcerating forces. an
unsettling aspect that ernerges strongly in Heaney 's early work in particular.
Parker also notes how a proportion of Heaney poems take place at the
"intersection of the real and the surreal, the concrete and the abstract, public and
private spheres."a-1 Other critics also note this 'inbetween' space as a metaphor
for Heaney's suspension between place and displacement. Hart notes how
Heaney crosses "back and forth between different enclosures. whether they be
Irish o r English, British o r Arnerican, Protestant o r Catholic, Romantic o r Classic."
Hart's deconstructive bias accords a certain agenda to such Heaney works as The
Huw Dlntern. which h e t e m s a "miniature but probing grammatology that
attacks 'logocentric"' thinking. Yet such a reading does not account for the
recurrent privileging of voice in Heaney's writing, as an indeterminant factor
complicating any distinction between speech and writing. o r presence and
absence in his poetics-u Smith also seizes o n Heaney's state of "inbetweenness,"
remarking how Ianguage functions as "itself a site of displacement." and
perpetual hornecorning.45
Molino quotes an architectural analogy made by Heaney in a BBC interview.
where he speaks of a -'dark centre. the blurred and irrational storehouse of insight
and instincts. the hidden core of the self-this notion is the foundation of what
14
language."-ib Yet the uncanny notion of a "hidden core" conjures up images of
both captivity and shelter, and if related to the idea of l e 'found' poetic voice
suggests an anxiety on Heaney's part to keep this inner zone a mystery-an
unknowable. unquantifiable place where the 'pre-reflective' and the 'pre-verbal'
also hold sway as sounds that rnay just as easily escape the "construct of
language." The solid image of the "'storehouse"' essentially refiects a symmetry
and unfussy utility of design37 Perhaps one reason Heaney sees the voice as
buried so deeply is because it dwells in an aesthetic sironghold of poetic rnemory,
its sustaining values under attack from many sides. Heaney needs to keep open
this access to the enigmatic and 'irrational' energies that inform his writing,
springing from the landscape and language itself.
Matthews rejects 'mystery' as a valid poetic or literary criterion, refemng to
the way the aesthetic mode of reading dominates the poems until it appears as "a
space of almost mystical wholeness" removed from political and historical
contexts in some commentaries. These critiques. associated with Helen Vendler's
method of reading, sustain an "organicist model of lyric poetry [. .- 1 a model
which is at least superficially under question in Heaney's [. .- 1 own selfconsciousness" about his nature poetry. Heaney destabilizes the dichotomy
between the 'natural' and 'unnatural' as part of his poetic practice. Early on.
Amencan aesthetic. placeless and timeless views of poetry" by locating the verse
15
"aesthetic with the political," which the examples of Mandelstam and Yeats help
foster. Matthews contends that the 'flimsy' nature of such Heaney sequences as
"Squarings" mark an "assault on the Yeatsian tower*' and the "foundation of
Thoor Ballylee as a symbolic place of writing."Jo It is arguable. however. to what
extent the description of "willed provisionality" holds when applied generally to
Heaney's poetry. where an assumed embrace of the tentative and fragmentary is
not necessarily reflected in the choice of fonn.sI He still pays homage to
convention in his use of the sonnet. for example. as "A Hyperborean." discussed
in chapter four. demonstrates.
4'1 S tc\.cn Mar t hctvs. Irish I ' o r r ~ :IWiric-S.Hisrury. Negotiirlion (London: Macrn i l lm. I '997; Nc\v York
St. &Martins.1937) 1 6 - 18. Marihctvs dso cites Ton? Curtis, Robcrt Wclch. and W n a Longic!. ris adhcrcnts
Walc-ofr88- 1 16.
16
been placed on examining Walcott's aesthetics as a painter.53 Walcott's reading
of cities bas drawn comment. J. Michael Dash. speaking of The Anfilles:
Frcqrnents of Epic Menmp. notes his vision of the Caribbean city as "polyglot
and indeterminate."s-i Critics often speak of Walcott as existing in an
'inbetween' state as well, and view the poetry as reflecting this fluid condition.
As Edward Baugh States of the division into halves of The Arkunsus Tertu~rzenl.
both 'Here' and 'Elsewhere' are negotiated from the point of view of the
trmsient. In the accounts of both 'counhies', we are likely to find the
persona travelling tlzrouglz. working out of a hotel room (sometimes a
beach house) which is at one and the same time an emblem of his
precarious. 'floating' condition and a protection o r refuge. a mask of
anonymity.55
As Baugh suggests. the rmm funciions in an analogous way to the unsettled
'placing' poetry represents which also clairns Walcott. a space where the notion
Antoine Hotel act as "symbols of privilege and affluence which dominated the
view of the Morne from the harbour."j6 Against these stand the -*shacksof the
pooi' on the overlooking hillside, representing "the other, unwritten history of
the place." He notes how in the poem Walcott identifies his original house. with
its bougainvillea and allamanda vine-covered porch, with his mother "until each
33 Cniic~;u.ho I'CK'US
on Walcott as a paintcr-pcxt includc: Louis Jamcs, " b d s c a p c LockcJ in Ambcr.- rcv.
o r Atiofirrr I-ife. by Dcrck Walott. Cornnrorr~vral~ll
N~wslerrrr6 1974: 14- 15: Wwwd Baugh. "Pi nicrs
and Piiniing in Afrofiler lj/L.." Cnribbecrn @rrarfer& 36.1-3 ( 19230): K3-93. Rpt. Robcrr D. Hamncr. cd.
C r i l i d I'erspecrives uo l k r r k Wrrlt-off ( Washington, DC: Thrcc Coniincnrs. 1W3): 39-50;Manm
Stc\vriri. "Walcott and Painting- Jnr~icclJorrmd45( 1 9 8 1 ) : 35-68;Robcn Bcnscn. ' T h c Paintcr rrs Poct:
-Tire 1irrrar-y Ruvirw: Atr /~rrrrricrriutralJorrrtrcrl of Cotrrtvrrprcrry W r i r i ~
29
Dcrck Walcott's Mi~isirtr~rwr."
( 1%):
39-68.Rpt. Hamncr. cd. 33647; Clam Rosa d c Lima, "Wdcott, P i n t i n g and thc Shadmv of Van
Gogh," The Ar1 of Ikrek Walrort. cd. Stewart Brown (*MidGlamorgan: Scrcn. 199 1 ) 171-W.
54 J. ~MichaclDash, 73u Oflrer Arruric-a: Coribbearr Ijrvrafrrrr itr n Aktv Worll Chritu-rf (Charlottcsvil lc: UP
oc Virginia. 19%) 98.For Walcott's trcatrncnt of thc cicy and countnsidc. scc Pitricia Ismond. "North and
South: A Look rit Wdcoct's Mi&rrrrunrr,** Kirtrc&i
8 ( IY86): 77-85
55 Wward Baugh. "The Arknnws Tusfn~nenf."Brown. cd. 1 27-28.
56 Eh\ ard Baugh. 1)ert.k Wdc-orr: M m o r y as Vision: AnotJwr Life (London: Longman, 19713) 2 1.
17
becomes the other." Baugh also notes. most strkingly in relation to Heaney, how
Walcott also invokes 'presences' in architectural objects.57 Baugh quotes from a
review Walcott wrote observing that objects. 'Yumiture and landscape exist to
strengthen the meaning of human existence."ssThis factor-a sensitivity to the
19th century salon" evoking the "mute past" of objects: "Walcott's empathy
with the cultural markers of this scene is tempered by his suspicion that the spirit
of the house is a clich. Yet he doesn't disdain that spirit. In a moment of fellow
feeling, he pities it for its own sense of exile."sg Baugh argues that Walcott, in the
process of 'living' in his "'different gift. 1 its element metaphor [. ..1"' has tumed
increasingly to self-relexive readings of the textual encounter. This, essentially,
has resulted in a steady fusion of spaces within his poetry. an ideal figured in
"For the Altar-piece of the Roseau Valley Church, Saint Lucia," frorn "Sainte
Lucie." Secr Grupes. As Baugh observes. the poern "fuses the painter. the
painting and the cornmon folk of the Roseau Valley who are represented in the
painting. That fusion is a central point of the poem. the inter-rootedness of the
place, its people and its art."60 But the architectural pivot-point of the poem's
'turns' needs mentioning as well. As Walcott writes: "The chapel. as the pivot of
this valley. 1 round which whatever is rooted loosely turn~."~61
This architecture
5' Baugh. Ilerc4 WcllcottS5.
' 8 ~ h crc\.ic~\\\,asof a film swsion of Giuscppi dc h p c d u s a ' s 7 k I~opctrd.Dcrck Walcott. "11 Sccs
H i s r o c a Endca\uur.*' TfiitidndG~tardimrI
39 A pri I 1964: S. Qtd. in Baugh. JluruX. \Vdr-ofr 26.
''~Torn Slcigh. 'To Go Ncxvhcrc," rcv. of The 1101my. by Dcrck Watcoi~.Rosron Book Reviuiv 4 ( 1997):
38.
U\rarJ Baugh, "Ri pcning \vi ih Walcott," Cmihkurt Qtuirreriy 93.2-3 ( 1 0 : W-YO. RPC-Hmncr. cd.
285.
(1 1 Dcrck Walcotr, Sm Grcrprs (London: C a p , 1976) 53.
18
poetry as a 'craft' that shades into painting and shares its goals and limitations."
"As a result." she continues. "he maintains an awareness of the spatial and visual
properties of writing. For Waicoa. visual art is not a separate and cornpetitive
system. but a pan of poetry itself. even as metaphor. semiotics. and narrative shape
visual a r t 3 3 This could be extended into his ideas on architecture, yet the stress
on writing risks obscuring the more indeterminable factor of voice in the poetry.
As Hamner writes of O~~ieros.
"Undergirding the prosody and the narrative form
[. .. 1 is always the controlling factor of Walcott's voice."h.<While Hamner's
intention is to mark the presence of Waicott's narrator. he implies how the formal
movement of the poem is structured into a coherent pattern by this feature.
Several critics have noted the way Walcott sometimes fits spatial fonn and
6 2 Baugh. "Pintcrs,"Wmncr. cd. 24849.
6 3 Rci T c r a d 1Jurt.k Wakorf'sPorfry: &nericari Mirnicc (Boston: Northcastcm UP. 1W-)120. 149. Sec
also hcr r c m x k s on rhc "*cn~cnvhcl
mingly spatial'' rnclriphorid "ncttvork" prcscni in 'Thc Hoicl Norrnandic
Pool. Tcmda 138.
04 Robcrt D. Hamncr. /:Pic of rhe Dispos.sess~tl=D e r d IVnlcorf ' s Omcros (Columbia: U of Missouri P.
199-7) 6.
"
19
ocean and green. chuming forest' is an image for the poem itself*" and thus acts
as a site of mediation for a nurnber of issues.6jThe poem's form is loosely mimetic.
in a 'gestunng' sense. stnictured or 'staged' by Walcott in order to convey the
physicality of the beach house, alongside its metaphorical powen of suggestion:
Once we have dnven past Mundo Nuevo trace
safely to this beach house
perched between ocean and green. chuming forest
the intellect appraises
objects surely. even the bare necessities
of style are tumed to use66
Form acts to visually reinforce the content. as the precarious nature of West
Indian architecture. continuaily subject to the elements, is also expressed here in
the balancing of the lines one on top of the other. Walcott's form encourages us
to read the poem mimetically, suggesting that the beach house topos holds a
particular place in his thinking about the nature of dwelling. These implications
will be further examined in chapter two.
Finally. Fred D'Aguiar's observations on "Cul de Sac Valley." from The
Arkunsas Testument, should be noted. The poem is divided into four parts. and
consists of forty-five identically formed quatrains. D'Aguiar suggests that
Walcott posits -'an inevitable symbiosis benveen the shapes that define a space
and place and the fonns and shapes of the poems that corne out o f it."67
20
correspondence. as the mimetic relationship between poetry and architecture is
stressed:
A panel of sunnse
on a hiilside shop
gave these stanzas
their stilted shape.68
D'Aguiar sees the quatrain as "a panel added to the overall building of the
poem." the sunrise-made shape a mode1 for the pattern:
Those hillside shacks and shops seem somehow to have grown out of the
landscape. seem outcrops of the elementai world. By locating the tightness
of the quatrain fonn firrnly in the 'natural' world Walcon is partly absolved
from the criticism of Iiterariness. of devices irnported to contain and
organise materiai that would othenvise take on looser, less lormal shapes.
He does this by claiming that in this example it is nature which dictates
what form the poern takes and not the poem which gives shape and form
to n a t u r e 9
As D'Aguiar implies, the rnetaphor for 'naturai' rootedness in the landscape that
evolves from the sunrise image on the shop is not unselfconsciously evoked. In
the notion of "devices imported to contain and organise material" the possibility
anses that Walcott's poetic architecture may still be paying oblique homage to
traditional forms in West lndian and English housing, as well as verse. The
'natural' sunrise also refers to the civilizing mission of colonialism. as with these
rays he ironically alludes to the Empire on whom 'the Sun will never set.''o
D'Aguiar raises important issues and "Cul de Sac Valley," alongside Walcott's
ideas conceming architecture. craft. and form, will be further examined in chapter
one.
Chapter one deals with Heaney and Walcott's poetics of architecture as
68 Dcrck Wdcott. 'lw Arkatws Tesrnrnunr (London:
h b c r . 19238) Y.
70 I n rclation to this sunrisc rhc ctymology of 'Tom' may bc s i g n i f i m t . As Frank points out, thc word
furtrr cornes [rom thc Indo-Europcan trier-hk. mcaning to sparkic or glcam. as fbrm c m bc scen or known
by rhc light ir @\.CSoff: "in Lhis tvay. cdgc of lighl-bcginning of ontrast-dctcrmincs or signifies thc shripc
of thc fbrm \vc scc." Frank 272.
21
expressed in their essays. reviews. interviews. and addresses. Their recognition of
the spatial element of language is apparent. as is their conception of poetic fonns
through the use of architectural metaphon. Moving from more direct architectural
observations, 1 trace the way these ideas inflect upon their notions of
composition. voice, and ultimately how the making of f o m s becomes a means of
engaging their cultures in dialogue. Architecture emerges as central to their
poetics.
In Chapter two I begin examining the poetry in detail. The architectural
sensibilities of each pwt are explored in connection with the am bivalent
relationships they maintain with their respective homes. Though several critics
have pointed out the role of displacement in their poetry. the actual metaphoncal
construction has not been examined closely in this respect. For Heaney and
Walcott. the poetic process Ieads them to adopt a liminal status on the borden of
society. The use of architecture as a way to enter imaginatively into histoncal and
memory-related rnatters and situations is apparent. as various settings are evoked
and explored.
Chapter three looks at the way the phenornenon of the Big House (as i t is
known in Ireland) and the West Indian Great House is represented in the poetry
of Heaney and Walcott. A number of other centers and sites in the poetry will be
22
architectural metaphon frequently act as organizing frameworks for the
imagination. Eiegiac rebuilding or the *housing'of memory in cenain poems leads
Heaney and Walcott to involve the reader-listener in an often mimetically
C h a ~ t e One:
r
Reading Architecture in Heanev
and Walcott's Poetics
At several points in Derek Walcott's Onrervs a deepening in the narrative
occurs with the sounding of a conch-shell. or its metaphoricd equivdent. sending
the imagery carried in his terza riniu spiraling off in a fresh direction. Drawing on
the work of D'Arcy Thompson. who considered organic form expressive of both
beginnings and ends. causes and purposes, Philip Kuberski writes of the metaphor
of the shell: "each 'new' development in a spiral is both a departure and a retum
to i ts own nature." It acts as a -'metaphor of a larger metaphoric process of
organic development."i In Heaney's and Walcott's work we see a search for
poetic form that is organically, intuitively occumng, emerging spontaneously frorn
within. and a competing awareness of the inescapable artificidity of forrns. the
exterior iogic of power that bears down on creative judgments. As Heaney States,
poems are impiicitly "formations at once organic and contrived."? What would
be a shell must become an oikos, a house or construct of a different order, acted
23
24
that 'speak' or demand to be read. While an almost religious veneration for form
emerges in their poetic discourses over tirne-poetry and buildings are given
sacred force-so also does an underlying distnist of cultural systems that attempt
to organize perception and responses. The relationship between architectural and
poetic form is made problematic in the discourses of Heaney and Walcon by such
tensions. as this chapter will explore. Architecture emerges as a way of
conceptualizing poetic form in the language each poet uses to tdk about the
creative proess. In a broader sense, however, the focus will be on the use of
architecture as a metaphor in their thinking about language, identity, and poetry.
Beginning with Heaney. the discussion will move from an examination of the
values and meanings expressed by certain architectural sites, into an analysis of
the staternents each poet makes regarding factors such as poetic craft. technique.
and voice. The comments of Heaney and Walcott on various p e t s are important
here. Joseph Brodsky. Emily Dickinson. Robert Frost. Osip Mandelstam. and
Yeats are among those to whom they refer. Through a survey of the i d e s
expressed in their poetics, the link behveen architecture and poetry in the forma1
realm of the verse will becorne more firmly established.
Heaney once faced an unusual question from Henri Cole. who asked: "What
about architecture? If you could be a building, what would you be?" He replies:
obdurate endurance and an underlying perfection. Part of the appeal may be the
-(
39.144 (lm)120-21.
25
grounded qudity it shares with the Stone world of Ireland. The design parallels
the deep cultural rooting of the Irish in their milieu and shows the fondness of
Heaney for plain, generally unnuanced forms, reliable in function. Yet there is a
stolid predictability about its monumental "sweep" that is troubling, and he
chose another 'ruin' to immonalize in "Mycenae hokout." that undoes such
stasis through its jagged formal arrangement. The Pantheon is a sublimely
intimidating structure to identify with, yet d s o an innately conservative choice. ifs
sacrai temple character as unhomely as an Egyptian pyramid, or the Boyne tombs.
1 was in the desert and it was night. I needed some place to lie down, some
shelter. and came upon this lean-to made of posts angled up against some
sort of wall or cliff face. And over the posts there rvere skins or some sort
of covering. 1 crept in undemeath this to sleep for the night and then in the
next frame of the dream it's broad moming, sunlight, the cliff face has
disappeared. the lean-to is gone. I'm out in the open. What 1 had taken to
be a solid wall had actually been the side of a liner docked in the Suez
Canal and during the night the liner had moved 011.5
With the loss of the ship's illusionary foundational support, the form of the leanro simply disintegrates in the uncanny context suggested by his second. interna1
sleep. The sleep he dreams of provides a frarning mechanism for the shock of
exposure that follows upon waking, and suggests the impossibility of dwelling
"in the proper sense," to quote Theodore A d ~ r n oHeaney's
-~
predicament is
compounded by the description of his Harvard existence as "like nesting on a
ledge. being migrant, k i n g in someone else's house, in fact."T All three of the
5 Colc 96.
(1
I/U Modrrrr
26
* Scamus Hcrinc!-.
27
subjectivity. an interna1 merger of sensibility with the extemal world's
architecture is imagined.
Heaney presents a deteministic notion of formative reading as an encounter
with active powers that colonize vision. He grants buildings a subjectivity which
he ultirnately traces back to the makers of these forms. A sinister, faintiy
lurks within the exchange that sees a mistrust emerge: the powerful strain of
'oratow expressed in such forms may conceal a confidence trkk designed to
play upon the ernotions. The impression of the "known" cames an ambiguity at
its core as these "remembered forms" occupy their place in the mind. The
9 Wnting of Gcorgc Bairiillc. Dcnis Hollicr notes how architccturc "'capturcs swicty in rhc t n p of ihc imrigc
it offcrs. fixing i t in ihc spccular imagc it rcficcts back- IL. locus is that of the i m a g i n q undcrstcxxi rit its
rnosr dicmoriril. ~ . h c r ihc
c ccmcnt of faith confirms religions and kingdoms in thcir authority."
Architccturc. in Britaillc's conception. "ducsnot csprcss the sou1 of ,lioc.iciics but n t h c r srnothcrs it." Dcnis
Hollicr, Agiriru-f Arc#tifuc.frrre: The \Vrifi~~,ps
of &orgr Bcrrclilk. trans. Bctsy Wing (Crimbndgc. MA: MIT
P, 1992) 47.
28
in the opposite direction by pointing out ine humanistic, elevating possibilities
form lends itself to. Like any language, he states, "the language o f forms can be
understood in terms of its roots. or its bonowings, o r its clichs. or its creative
action. It can be spoken mechanically o r originally, coarsely o r elegantly; and just
how it is spoken by individual buildings is going t o affect its efficacy as an
instrument for humanising and refining o u r consciousness." In giving buildings a
human agency and comparing individual exarnples to "instrument[s]" capable of
edifying the recipient, Heaney privileges the way such an expression of power
demands the nght govemance of rhetorical capabilities. A political dimension
emerges. 10 The exercising of power latent in the "language of fonns" begins with
the creators, in his opinion. as the "formal solutions and imprintings of a building
[. .- 1 serve some function and responsibility beyond the pure utilitarian and
aesthetic. They become a human statement and give new emphasis-or express
fresh resistance-to values and attitudes already embodied in the existing forms."
Heaney stresses the resiliently "human" element that inheres in architecture.
Architecture offers a site of negotiation with the p s t . However, architects are
seen as testing "values." and re-imagining formal possibilities. from a threshold
perspective that also faces the future.
T h e ambiguous nature of form as a closed, potentialfy totalitarian system.
rnirroring and refracting the desires o f its inhabitants draws Heaney back as h e
locates the "language of forms" at the heart of the political unconscious. The
"poliiics of buildings," he claims, may be "mute but they are potent. They supply
some of the dream images by which the polir. the group. identify themselves and
therefore they cannot be innocent of their own force as political. in the widest,
non-partisan sense of the term." Designing buildings cames an imperative in that
I O Cf. His notion of thc "govcrnmcnt of thc ionguc" r c g i d i n g p o c f q ' s riurhority: "As r d c r s , WC submit
to Lhc jurisdiction of a c h c v d form. cven though that S o m is r i c h i c \ d not by dint of the m o r d md ethicai
cscrcisc of mind but by rhc sclf-6-didating opcntions of what ~ v c d 1 inspiration [..-1" (GT 92).
29
a culpable force is directed. tapping into and manipulating the collective psyche.
In this respect, he adds, architects cannot claim "artistic quarantine and say they
are deding on1y in techne or know how. What they design becomes [ ...J
syrnbolic, and once we enter the realm of the symbolic, we have crossed the
threshold of human mind and feeling." But the political context's insidious.
irresolvable tensions, far from king transcended with the turn to the symbolic, are
camed across. Coole Park exists in this "realm of the symbolic" for Heaney.
epitomizing architectural excellence, and in reactionary tems, a '-sacred space." a
phrase he borrows from the anthropologist Mircea Eliade. In straining to make
the 'Yanguage of forms" bridge secular and spiritually-attuned realms, Heaney's
language undergoes a Neo-Platonic reversion as Coole Park is made the ideal
form. rernoved from reality. Like the Pantheon, Coole Park saeguards the
cumulative virtues of generations of formal refinement. but also marks a h c i r s
c.iussicirs of the insidious power it is imagined to rise above.
The dernolition of the house by developers marks a crime against the polic.
one in which the "language of forms" suffers desecration as well. Heaney calls it
an "act of vandalism."~1 Aligning hirnself with the old order. he argues: "it
represents a definite assault upon the covenant between power and aesthetics."
This argument finds its parallel in Heaney's treatment of Christopher Marlowe's
"
Hero and Leander, " where he defends a canonical text from hostile revisionist
critics. 12 In his idealistic portrayal. Coole Park symbolizes this "covenant" in its
divine rernoval from mundane affairs. The identification rvith ruling class values
flies in the face of the politics of the weak and dispossessed Heaney espouses
elsewhere. and in his verse. He emerges as a defender of a dubious faith against
the builder MacAlpine. who wrecked "a mature and culturally significant site."
11
Hcanc5.. "Macccnas"70.
30
Heaney describes him as k i n g from "another social reality." He represents a
"MacAlpine principle" where al1 deference to f o m s is trarnpled underfoot.
Building, displacing architectural purity. pollutes the site, in the guise of a
"secuiar, economic, democratic, utilitarian, wellington-booted. hard-hatted
en terprise." Heaney laments the loss of "paternalistic" order, deriding the social
mechanism of "planning permission and public funds" that now brutalize his
vision of high cultural achievement. He larnents the way "private patronage [and]
the fortification of a ruling caste" have been debased by the "flow of money."
'MacAlpine builders' are demonized in his reading. Signaling a "new
dispensation," the vengeful nse of the workers to undermine the "visionaries"
is played out in his scenario. Heaney overlooks the social roots of these "bloodyminded" figures w h o "represent a constant aspect of the social conditions within
which architects. as the makers and breakers of form. must also work." The
MacAlpine type of worker's ability to break form (and remake it) is excluded.
Their zeal becomes a mere barbaric urge for profit
Heaney goes o n to discuss the importance of vemacular Irish architecture,
and includrs this "idiom" as part of the "formal architectural language." which
he argues is "being spoken to us d l the time." But, with regard to Coole Park.
his cnticism of the MacAlpine "sappers" masks a defensiveness about his own
31
more subtly and convincingly in his verse. A s "A Peacock's FeatherT' (discussed
in chapter three) reveals. Heaney's relationship to patrons and patron p e t s is
more problematic than the bond he implies between Irish architects and power.
In poem xxii from "Squarings." Heaney confronts questions directly relating
to form in a way b a t deliberately undermines the idea of an unassailable "sacred
space." The notion of an artistic 'higher cailing' expressed above. perhaps with a
trace of irony, returns here as well. "Where does spirit Iive?" the opening asks.
''Inside or outside / Things remem bered. made things, things unmade?"l4 A
concern with the housing of consciousness haunts the poem:
What came first, the seabird's cry or the sou1
Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?
Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks
In a jackdaw 's nest up in the old stone tower
1 3 Hmncy "~Maccnas"69.
1
the "Maecenas in Coole Park" trope. Here the "perfected fom" appean
unhomely in implication. and the tower is finally portrayed as a place of "spirit"
dwelling that offen little inner solace.
In his speech to the architects. Heaney answers these questions almost in the
spirit of Yeats. Maecenas, standing for a hierarchical "system of privilege," afso
represents the "pre-democratic world where power and arbitration. in matters of
taste as well as in matters of state. are kept in the hands of what the Romans
called the optirni, the best people."is These are matters of style and refined taste.
Heaney defends the aristocratie system through recourse to their collective
achievernents. again in terms which rest uncornfortably with his poetic views
elsewhere. Citi ng the "architectural magnificence" of "great works." from the
Kremlin to the Boyne Valley tumuli, he argues that they al1 depended upon "a
centralised and secure elite" for their completion. The insular Irish inheritance
proceeds from this same system:
From the Rock of Cashel to Castletown House, from Jerpoint Abbey to the
Custorn House and the Four Courts, the contribution of the Norman
ecclesiastical power and the Anglo-Irish ascendancy has k e n assumed
into Our heritage and Our consciousness. We c m stand before these
monuments and not feel oppressed, politically or aesthetically. If they
affinn a sense of possession, they do so by now without any intent to
affront. If they symbolise their original proprietor's place at the top of the
power structure, they also display an awareness of knowing their place
topographically. culturally and-by now-historically.ifi
Heaney clairns these sites now offer a reconciliatory space of connection with the
33
observer. However. the implication is that the "sense of possession" they affirm is
also over the onfooker. The reference to Irish architectural achievements
"knowing their place" clearly refers to a (lethai) social ordering that also implies
the masses. The 'con,' it appears, is complete.
Heaney's poetry, which so intuitively evokes the pagan unconscious he
reads in the land's markings, and in language itself, is jettisoned by association
here for the civilizing mission that the Maecenas image promotes. Maecenas
symbolizes a placatory force encouraging humility and social prudence. In the
latter stages of the address, after invoking what amounts to a secular priesthood
of architects. he tones down the rhetoric, claiming that their responsibility is to
'-bear witness to space as a human home rather than space as geornetric
dimension. It is up to the architect to keep faith with human scale. to remember
that the spirit and the unconscious need caring for, need to dwell in arnity inside a
building."l7 Y et. architecture. to be "conservati ve of the nesting instinct in
human beings," does not have to be "reactionary in style or technique." A key
factor is raised with the notion of "faith," implying that society I m k s to the
architect as having access to a syrnbolic "language of forms."
Architects. keepers of the covenant, are implicated in a metaphor of cosrnic
proportions in Heaney's opinion: "each new structure involves, in a deep
metaphorical sense, a re-creation of the world. and so contributes towards the
bringing into being of a certain kind of world." Comparing Blake's notion of the
"act of poetic imagination.' to the architectural process of making, Heaney
implies how the divine and secular meet, sounding as a "repetition within the
finite rnind of the etemal 1 AM." The architect. though existing in the "world of
the profane space [. ..1 cannot escape from casting a vote, as it were, in favour of
that profanity or against it." His or her subjectivity bears the stamp of the master-
34
architect. the ethos of the supreme patron who may speak through their forms.
Heaney's speech continues to explore the relation between "profane" and
"sacred" architecture. Many "profane" sites become "sacred spaces" over time,
he grants, raising the question of whether the "local mana'' that "still emanates
space is still more than vestigially sacred. and it is both his pnvilege and his
responsibility to be its custodian. What is improvised upon the drawing board
today will be improvised upon the consciousness of the future: the writing. so to
speak, is in the wall." Still. in Heaney 's association of this *'sacred [ ...] pnvilege"
with the chosen few immortalized within Code Park's "perfected form."a
35
us. It is also at such moments that we have our first inkling of pastness and
find o u r physical surroundings invested with a wider and deeper
dimension than w e cm. just then. account for.i8
Another covenant with tradition lies in this attitude toward the past that finds its
way into Heaney's verse. Recovery of a "primary relish" for nooks and crannies
one: aii the spaces he notes figuring analogously for the constructed space of the
poern. For him their f o m s mediate between cognition and the unknown,
language and the inexpressible. located at the expanding "verge of [. .. ]
36
the poem stands in symbolically for what it purports to represent. becoming
through its form the connecting means, o r "point of entry," into this "*cornmon
-.. ground,'. and the reality of a "lost world" it houses. Heaney is talking not
only of the way these charged objects can enhance life, but by implication, how
poetry itself can supply the "air which our imaginations inhale." The seat. while
possessing a "kind of moral force," a definite power, is a cipher for form as well,
both architectural and poetic, in the way it speaks silently of duties and
responsibilities. and a covenant, again, with eariier makea. The implication lingen,
though. that the objects' insistence upon "human solidarity" draws those around
them into the "ghost-life" as well, an aesthetic reverie not unlike the sinister
*mirror-trap' effect of the architectural discussed above. Heaney cultivates this
atmosphere, as it is the entry point he takes into writing many of his own poems.
The "language of fonns" is afso proposed as a means of intuiting presence, as
shown in his recollection of a childhood memory from Mossbawn. He describes
the object-strewn top of the dresser in the farm kitchen as "like a time machine,"
a simile which could be applied to his and Walcon's poetry. This humble
miscellany functions as a lexicon of forms in his mind. They were "living some
kind of afterlife. Something previous was vestigially alive in them. They were not
just inert rubbish but dormant energies, meanings that could not be quite
deciphered."?.o He describes his response to this arcane vocabulary as '-al1
sensation, tingling with an amplification of inner space, subtly and indelibly
linked with the word 'old."' Awareness of a deepening imaginative reality
occurs with ordinary things which yet "swam with a strangeness." Another
instance is revealed in the discovery of old house foundations when digging
goal-posts. The hole begins to "open down and back to a visionary field, a
phantom whitewashed cottage with its yard and puddles and hens. The world
37
Rad been arnplified; looking and seeing began to take on aspects of imagining
and remembering." In a trope that recurs in his poetry numerous times, the center
becornes a 'door into the dark' of possibility. The foundations are "arnplified by
imagination to achieve an "afterlife" in the "time-machine" of remembered
architectural forrn. The whole "language of forms" depends on this metaphoric
"amplification," and Heaney's spatialization of objects extends in the final
anaiysis to words themsefves.
Later in the article he attempts to define poetry itself through an extended
metaphor. seeing it situated Janus-faced at the intersection of past and future. The
word signifies. "an orb on the horizon of time, simultaneously rising and setting,
imbued with the sunset blaze of master-works from the tradition yet dawning on
every poet like h o p or challenge."^^ This is one of the recurrent threshold
metaphors Heaney uses for poetry, offering insight for the way he relies on a
spatial reilication to generate a vibrant image of temporal suspension. Calling
language a "time-charged medium," Heaney argues how the poetic mind can
never "rid itself of temporal attachment," leading him into a consideration of f o m
"The actual poetic task is to find a way of melding the intuitive and affectionsteeped cvord-world of personal rnernory with the fonn-hungry and projecting
imagination, to find an idiom at once affective and objectified. as individuai as
38
handwriting and as given as the conventions of wnting itself."22 Hence the
appeal of the "language of fonns" idea, offenng both a covenant with tradition
and the scope for revisionary individual dialogue.23 The writing metaphors
Heaney uses. however. point to a concern with finding an "idiom" that is
actuall y synonymous wi th discovered poetic voice.
Heaney's view of poetry as first craft. then ultimately technique, depends on
the shift in voice from instrumental means to end. Craft and technique have an
important role in both Heaney 's and Walcon's poetics for the way the ideals of
skillful making and design sanction access to a shared "language of fonns" with
architects. Heaney, however, conceives of craft in an inverted manner from
Walcon, who follows the conventional notion that this represents the culmination
of a poet's development. In "Feeling into Words," Heaney speaks of the "sense
of crafting words [. ..] words a s bearen of history and mystery began to invite
me" ( P 45). Craft is the pragmatically acquired "skill of making," for him,
preceding the deeper engagement with voice and self that evolves as technique.
Craft is a poet's "way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal
texture." It lays the foundation for what is to corne.
In contrast, for Heaney technique involves a "definition" of the poet's
--stance towards life [ ... of his own reality" (P 47).2-<Technique enables the poet
to "raid the inarticulate," through "a dynarnic alertness that mediates between
the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the fomal ploys that express
these in a work of art." Intuition, attuned to the containing facility of form proves
2 2 Hcanq.. "Placc" 41.
Hcancy's rcmarks in thc forcword io a rcccnt book on n a \ . Irish art: 'k.hat suys constant bchind thc
bcu.ildcrcd multiplicity of individuai stylcs is thc symbolic naturc of thc Imguagc thrit art spca)is. a
Irviguagc that allous rhc inwardncss of individual consciousncss 10 p I c y with thc h c l y manitgcablc
rcality that surrounds it." Scamus Hcanc>., forcword. Modem AR in Ireland. cd. Dorolhy Wdkcr (Dubtin:
Lilliput, 1997) 10.
34 For Walcott tcchniquc is implicit in craft nthcr than thc othcr weayround. as discusscd belou.. Voicc
marks thc final achicvcmcnt of c d t , and pariidoxically ihis lcads inio anonymity.
2-3 Cf.
39
vital to this process: "Technique entails the watermarking of your essential
patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your
lines: it is that whole creative effort of the mind's and body's resources to bnng
the meaning of experience within the junsdiction of fom." Heaney seems to be
reaching beyond stylistic considerations to touch upon an oracular element that
occupies a "pre-verbal" level of formative impulse. He uses as an example the
water diviner, whose gifts represent "pure technique." yet also suggest pure
intuition. In privileging technique and treating craft as "know how," as he says
to the architects, access to a larger 'design' is gained: the "threshold of human
mind and feeling." Technique ernerges as the ideal state of the fonn-making
imagination at its most focused.
Reminiscent of Eliot's idea of the 'impenonality' denoted by immersion in a
living tradition. both Heaney and Walcott conceive of a guild-like purity of
impulse present in the poetic process. Poetry, Heaney States, "constitutes a rule, a
habit. a disciplinu for every practitioner."zs Form grows from the maker's
engagement with their materials. lnner laws reveal themselves to the initiated.
Many Heaney poems, from 'Thatcher" to "An Architect," and to the tailor in
"Three-Piece." elucidate this relationship as vocation and forma1 language are
inextricably combined.26 All resemble the poet in the ability to "make palpable
what was sensed or raised," as Heaney says of the diviner ( P 48). In ideaiizing
such figures the "language of foms" is made visionary in scope. They become
'technicians.' liminally placed on the border between the secular and the sacred.
The cultivation of an objective 'language of vision' was a factor associated
with the Bauhaus, forerunner of the International Style in architecture.27 In
2 5 S c m u s Hcancy. "Brodstiy 's Nobci: What thc AppIriusc \\.asA bout." New York
Sot.. 198'7: 63.
2'
40
founder Walter Gropius's 1919 manifesto, architects. sculpton and painters are
considered together through an understanding that there is "no essential
difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted
crafisrnan."28 For Gropius the source of creativity was to be found in an artist's
proficiency in a craft. This lent itself to anonymity as a goal. a perspective
reinforced by the mode1 of the medieval German Buuhtten. or 'kraft guilds," as
Mark Gelernter notes.29 Recalling Heaney's emphasis on making "palpable" the
"sensed or raised," a matter that becomes second-nature with technique. the
original guilds stressed that design and execution reflect one continuous process.
Forrns could be found, Gelernter adds, "in the nature of their materials, in their
constructional systerns and in the functional uses to which the objects would be
put." These ideas heavily influenced the Bauhaus. After 1921 a more
41
Both poets have acknowledged the time spent in 'apprenticeship' leaming
how to compose the fully finished poem. For each, the finding of voice begins in
reading, memonzation, recitation. and imitation. An idea of the poem as a spatial
form whose innermost secrets awaited discovery is implied in Heaney 's memory
'trial-pieces.' he turns to a sculptural analogy describing the poems as. '-linle stiff
inept designs in imitation of the master's fluent interlacing patterns, heavyhanded clues to the whole craft" (P 45). They exist as fragments, in the modernist
trope, broken off from a larger artistic entity. Again, in "The Makings of a Music:
Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats," he discloses how 'makings' was chosen
in his title for the way it "gestures towards the testings and hesitations of the
workshop" (P 6 1). T h e workshop acts as a metaphor for the imagination for
Heaney. a threshold space where creativity and leaming are equally combined. It
becomes open to a visionary light at times, as the account of visiting sculptor
Dmitri Hadzi's studio reveals.
Heaney's comments on Hadzi's works illustrate the way he regards
technique as having triumphed over craft in the sculpter's output. Responding to
the "deeply satisfactory self-sufficiency" of the sculptures evident in their
thoroughly "finished" nature. he relates them to poetry through the "language
of forms" they participate in: "They are like those forms which W. B. Yeats
invokes in his poem 'Byzantiurn,' 'images that yet / Fresh images beget'; once I
settle myself to take in the balances and chdlenges of an individual piece. a
whole set of reinforcing presences and associations begins to congregate at the
edge of rny field of vision."31 A protean. organic element is ascribed to Hadzi's
42
combines traditional forms with a modem sensibility to create the neo-classic, in a
manner consistent with Walcott's notion that, "What's new about a classic is
that it stays n e w 3 2 Contemporaneity and timelessness fuse as Heaney inhiits
"reinforcing presences" speaking through the conduit of the form, beguiling him.
Hadzi's Greek-American ancestry, according to Heaney, is as 'elective as it is
genetic [...j behind his use of ancient motifs [lies] artistic intelligence and a
the work fails to be marked in parallel by his own here.35 Trying to render the
forms "couth," the civilizing mission only vaguely succeeds, as Heaney's
symbolic language remains caught up in his subjective response. The foreboding,
primordial nature of the works must be repressed. Through his allusions to
Hadzi's patrons (Harvard), and to mystical forces, he reins in "sculpter's [.. .1
laws." Yet this may be to misread the poem's context, a workshop piece rneant
only to give us "pause." Little comparison exists to "Mycenae Lookout."
(examined in chapter three), which Heaney formally dedicated to Hadzi and his
wife. where his voice once more cornes into its own.
Moss. a Scots word probably carried to Ulster by the Planters. and buwn. the
name the English colonists gave to their fortified farmhouses. Mossbawn, the
34 Hcancy. Hd'i 18.
-33Scamus Hcancy. The Phce of WriIing (Ailmia. GA: Scholar's. 1989) 70.
44
planter's house on the bog" (P 35). Other names are opened out in this way:
Mossbawn was bordered by the townlands of Broagh and Anahorish,
townlands that are forgotten Gaelic music in the throat, bruach and anuch
plior uisce. the nverbank and the place of clear water. The names lead past
the literary rnists of a Celtic twilight into that civilization whose demise
was effected by soldien and administraton like Spenser and Davies, whose
lifeline was bitten through when the squared-off walls of bawn and
demesne dropped on the country like the jaws of a man-trap. ( P 36)
The architecture and poetry of colonization insists itself into the landscape.
insidiously jawing its f o m s into the disparate meldings of Irish-English language.
Here the structures of enclosure, "squared-off walls of bawn and demesne," are
visualized in unison as linguistic and physical forms. A latent violence colours the
choice of metaphor; this incursion represents a rhetoric of power that brooks no
reply. The "man-trap" is figured as a perversely mechanized logos placing the
tem tory under a new dispnsation. He portrays a fusion of structures caught in
these words amid a web of historicai forces: an architecture of living forms.
Heaney alludes to how the "energies" of the words can be summoned, an aspect
of technique that carries with it the "secret of k i n g a poet" in his opinion.
"Feeling into Words" connects the poetic process with discovering such
"energy flows" in words. a factor leading to the finding of an informing voice ( P
42). In the conception fonnulated here. a "bugging device" provides the
metaphor for the "fundamental structure [in which the! voice [is 1 caught." and is
connected to the development of a critical ear (P 43). Poetic voice 'fingerprints'
the author. he contends, though it also bears a vernacular trace of a "poet's
speaking voice [... J his original accent." Poetic voice and "discovered style"
eventually become indistinguishable. signifying the core of what becornes
technique. For Heaney, an "essential quick" defines this core. inhabiting an
intemal zone of "'power,"' to quote the lines from The Prelude he opens with.36
36 Thcsc lincs run in part: 'Thc hiding placcs of my powcr 1 Sccm opcn [... 1 1 would
rhc p s t 1 For rururc rcstontion" (P41).
45
The figuratively architectural nature of Wordsworth's analogy becomes a way of
conceptualizing how the voice, and with it the making impulse, is informed by
memory in regard to different verbal sounds.
The aural is spatialized as Heaney describes how the formative encounter
with the verbal "music" of other p e t s results in a "true sounding of aspects of
younelf and your experience" (P 44). He attempts to ground the presence he
discerns in words in a systematic way. Having referred to the voice as a complex
structure and to sounds entering the "echo-chamber of [thel head," the ear is
now conceptualized as a symbolic site of building. A space is fonned in the ear by
the seminal influx of words from various sources: "they were edding the ear
with a kind of linguistic hard-core that could be built on some day" (P 45).
Rilke's notion. from his first sonnet to Orpheus, that poetry builds a "temple
inside the hearing" is invoked, a key idea for Heaney ( P W 3 2 ) Y Contrasting
such "unconscious bedding" with the "conscious savouring of words" through
poetry. certain works by Keats, Wordsworth, and Tennyson are remembered as
"touchstones of sorts, where the language could give you a kind of aural gooseflesh" (P 46).Heaney grounds his responses to these literary peaks in the ear.
With The Government of tlte Tongue. Heaney 's architectural metaphors
that the group speaking the language is possessed by" (GT33).Where voice is
37 In conncction wih thc 'tcmplc' imagc. an carlicr panllcl is intriguing. Thompson writcs or ihc ancicnt
traditions conccrning thc tclcologicril "concept oT end, o f purposc or 'design.'" with r c p r d [O g r o ~ and
h
or
form. Hc notcs how cightccnth-ccntur-y physics was strongly influcnccd by thc "argument of'thc final
c.iusc." dominating L. Okcn's Nur~rrphilosoplrie.Okcn's follow~rs.staics Thompson. '%WC wont io likcn
thc coursc of organic cvolution not to thc straggling brictics of ri ucc. but to the building o f a tcmplc.
dit.incly planncd, and ihc cro\vning of it with i t s polishcd minarc&." Thompson 3.
46
articulated at the h e m of technique' tone appears to live in languageshidden
places. But Heaney's accent on 'possession' recalls the idea expressed i n "From
Maecenas to MacAlpine" regarding the way architecture is taken in by
consciousness, and at a slight unease on his part over whose "spiritw-whose
"value systemW-hauntslanguage as a cultural structure. Heaney's anxiety over
language and the buned life it contains increasingly moves into metaphysical
notions relating to form. and the latent power of "sacred spaces." He posits his
choice of terms airhitecturally, as a reply in a 1989 interview reveals: "really the
question of how to place a structure upon which to rejoice, how to place a
geometry on the middle of absence, how to create a trustworthy form, is a sort of
religious question."38 The image of poetic architecture is evoked, frameworks
whose design is dependent on a faith in words and their powers.
Closely reiated to this "religious" dimension surrounding the making of
forms is Mandelstam's example, backed by Dante. Heaney notes Clarence
Brown's view of the Russian Acmeist group Mandelstam was associated with.
citing their, "sense of the poem as an animated structure, an equilibriurn of forces,
an architecture" (GT77).
He follows up the observation by honing in on the
47
Heaney sees the act of reading as able to move the poem in40 the body and mind.
invoking a lyrical transport. Only when animated by a force beyond mere
48
recitation and writen cognition, do true forms leap off the page.41 The essential
poetic voice must deeply organize a sonnet's form for it to be charged and
sensually activated. Shakespeare's sonnet-Schlegel made his works models of
organic fom- represents the dynamic ideal against which al1 othen are measured.
When Heaney considers Frost's legacy he raises similar concems, particularly
conceming poetry's "animated structure." Frost saw voice as having access to
sonic origin, a presence beyond, yet intimately connected to poetic language.
Heaney first notes Frost's fascination with sounds in their sensory and sensual
human capacities in an article on Sylvia Plath. M a t Frost terms "sentence
sounds" and "tones" carry a fonnal, impulse-laden charge as "vocal entities in
thernselves, predestined contours of the voice, previous to content and articulated
rneaning [...1" (GT 148). They act as poetic 'units,' primordial building blocks on
the tongue and in the ear. In "Above the Brim," his poerns are cited as "events in
language. flaunts and vaunts full of projective force [. ..]."a2 The spatializing
language ensures Frost's effects are seen as "not 'put on from without,"' but
stem from within the process itself. They represent "not a flourish of craft, but a
feat of technique."43 Heaney reiterates Frost's notion of the ongin of sentence
and speech-sounds: "The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from
voices behind a door that cuts off the words [...J It is the abstract vitality of our
speech. I t is pure sound-pure fonn."44 Frost's architectural images create an
equivalence with the "cave of the mouth" these -thingsOcorne to occupy, in
Lttero. as it were.
41 Cf. Mandelstam's mntcntion rcgarding The Divitre Cornedy that onIv whcn poctic matcrial is \.oiccd
docs i t ha\.c a truc cxistcncc: 'Thc finishcd p m is no morc Lhitn a dligraphic producl, thc incvitablc
rcsul t of thc impulsc to pcrfonn." Osip Mandclstsim. "Con\*crsationabout Drintc." Tl~eCotrrplefe Crifical
Prose. ttnns. Jnc Gary Harris and Constance Ljnk (Dana P o i n ~CA: Ardis, f 997) 284.
4 3 Scamus Hcancy. "A bovc thc Brim," Hotnage ro Robert Ftosl. by Joscph Brodsiq-. Scamus Hcancy,
Dcrck Waicott (Nc\v York: F m . 1%) 66.
43 Heiuicy. "Brim" 69.
44 Hcrincy. "Brim" 7 1. Problcmatically. the issue of mishcming is n i s c d as ri source of ongin; the idcal of
"purc sound." l i kc "pcrfcctcd form." rcmains a chi r n c r i d idcal.
49
For Heaney, Frost's poetry finally "gives access to origin by thus embodying
In Heaney 's view, the retreat by Yeats to the tower in County Galway
symbolizes his embrace of solitude as an apt mode of artistic existence. A
correlation between form and the architecture of poetic stance as self-projection
can also be read into the move. in '-The Place of Writing: W. B. Yeats and Thoor
Ballylee," Heaney sets out to show the process by which the tower becomes a
poetic symbol in his poems of the 1920s. and how "the poetic imagination in its
strongest manifestation imposes its vision upon a place rather than accepts a
vision from it [. .. l this visionary imposition is never exempt from the imagination's
antithetical ability to subvert its own creation.1... j once the place has been
brought into written existence, it is inevitable that it be unwrinen" (PW 20).
Yeats established "an outpost of poetic reality in the shape of a physical
landmark," even though he eventually came to undermine its perfections ( P W
2 1). Heaney evokes, for contrast, Hardy's birthplace in the "hearth world" of
Wessex: "Set among the trees. deep at the center of a web of paths and byeroads. in the matured stillness of an old garden, smalf -windowed. dark-ceilinged,
stone-floored, hip-thatched, the [house] embodies the feel of a way of life native
to the place." "We recognize," he continues, "a consonance between the inside
71.
50
and outside of that house and the center and circumference of Hardy's vision.
entering so deeply into the "prophetic strains of his voice that it could be
invoked without being inhabited" ( P W 24). He affirms the stakes at hand:
Bailylee was a sacramental site. an outward sign of an inner grace. The
grace here was poetry and the lonely tower was the p e t ' s sign. Within it.
he was within his own mind. The posture of the building corresponded to
the posture he would attain. The stone in al1 its obstinacy and stillness, the
51
plumb bulk and resistant profile of the keep, the dream form and the brute
Tact simultaneously impressed on mind and senses. al1 this transmission of
sensation and symbolic aura made the actual building Stones into
touchstones for the work he would aspire to. ( P W 24-25)
Heaney stresses the subjective nature of Yeats's relationship with the tower, as
the expression of a ''sacramental site" that corresponds symbolically with the
space of poetry, and finally the mind's form itself. Yet his analysis also appears to
criticize this (self-)embrace, particdarly in his emphasis on the ' p s t u r e "
necessary to attain the effect. The pretensions implicit in Yeats making "one of
the soul's monuments of its own magnificence" fil1 him with disquiet ( P W 24). In
contrast to Frost, it is an effect finally 'put o n from without' he implies. A
manipulative factor is involved. Noting the "transcendent imperative" attached
to the tower's image which elevates it out of history into an objective correlation,
Heaney turns in more detail to the way Yeats's choice of poetic f o n reflects his
architectural preoccupations.
The "place of writing" signified by the tower, Heaney observes, becomes in
"Sailing to Byzantium" essentially "the stanza form itself, that strong-arched
room of eight iambic pentameten rhyming ababahcc which serves as a redoubt
for the resurgent spiritW(PW29). Through Heaney's reading the architectural
moves into effect in a dominant, dmost overstated manner, as rhetorical homage is
paid to the redoubtable "spirit" of Yeats. He continues. in hyperbolic fashion:
52
by which the tower becomes a "sacred space" drawing in poetic form for Yeats,
also undermines its premises, as the earlier p e t tries to fix his vision in Stone.
With "The ower," Thoor Ballylee assumes its rnost extreme symbolic
significance, becoming in Heaney's estimation "a podium from which the spirit's
voice can best be projected" (PW 30). As much as Yeats, he encourages us to
read the poern's sections as verbal designs that 'repeat' the force and form of the
tower against the reverberations of this voice. Heaney's rhetoric proves mie to
the figural demands 'The Tower" rnakes o n its reader-listeners. In the third
section, for instance, he states how "the tower's stoniness is repeated in the lean.
clean-chiselled obelisk of the verse-form," giving rise to a "head-clearing
airiness." Formal considerations overwhelm with this analogy and Heaney
detemines that indeed, "the tower is now [...1 a pure discharge of energy
[marking ] an original space where utterance and being are synonymous." He
invokes Rilke, "another tower-dwelling visionary." in terms that accord with
fonn representing architecture in a poetic area of figural equivalence.
The telling factor in Heaney's veiled critique of Yeats regarding this space
rests in the unspoken emphasis on the word "needy" in the following passage:
suddenly in that needy space, a tower ascended. Not a tree. as in Rilke's
fint sonnet to Orpheus, not a natural given miracle but a built-up, livedwith, deliberately adhered-to tower. Yet by now that tower is as deep
inside our hearing as the temple which Rilke imagines the god Orpheus
building inside the listening consciousness of the creatures. Before the
visitation of his Song, their ear was full of humble, un-self-trusting
creaturely life, shabby buts full of common speech and unpoetic
desultonness. But his Song brought about a marvel. ( P W 3 1-32)
Through the agency of voice the tower is aligned with the making of the unique
"temple" represented by poetry 's effects. T h e creation myth he uses conflates
both the birth of architecture and the figurative nse of a poetic architecture into a
literary topos. Despite the scenario played out here, however, the lack signified
by the subjective impetus rernains within Yeats's "needy" consciousness, in the
53
space open to self-doubt and a lurking distrust of materiai securities. Yet Heaney
bears witness to what Yeats achieves on an extraordinarily elevated scale,
virtually mythologizing his character by association.46
Intensifying Rilke's metaphor. the connection between architecture, voice,
and poetic form is reinforced:
That sense of a temple inside the hearing, of an undeniable acoustic
architecture. of a written vaulting, of the finnness and in-placedness and
undislodgeableness of poetic fom. that is one of Yeats's great gifts to our
century; and his power to achieve it was due in no small measure to the
'beckoning,' the 'new beginning,' the 'pure transcendence' of an old
Norman castle in Ballylee, a place that was nowhere until it was a written
place. ( P W 32)
The idea of an "acoustic architecture" has resonances with Heaney's own
poetics, as we have seen, though more ambivalence surrounds his other choice of
words regarding form. i[Ulndislodgeableness" carries a sense of awkward
intransigence that seems at odds with the previously cited "airiness" of 'The
Tower." Alongside the apparent assurance in relation to form, according to
Heaney. "rnutinous9' self-doubts surface regarding "the final value and
trustworthiness of this powerfully composed tower in the ear [. ..1." As revealed
in the rigorous self-interrogation of 'The Black Tower." the perfections of
should have rernained secret," rnaking his tower an unhomely place3 Heaney's
-
For Y cab. Ril kc and thc ~ o ofph c ~towcr scc Thcodorc Ziolkouski. nie View fiorn f l ~ Torver:
e
Origins of an An1inlodm~isr11mge (mnccion: Pri nccion UP. 1998).
47 Dcspilc thcsc inncr assailings. thc cquivalcncc bct~vccnpoctn and architccturc rcmains intact, Hcruicy
conicnds: "thc fclicitous conccit of a stanm king a room goi vcrificd in p t v uhosc s)niactic and mcuical
vaulting \vas thc cquivalcnr of h i 'chmbcr archcd Ivith stonc' in tvhich Ycats composcd the s>.nia.ruid
mctrc of his own stanzas" (PIV 36).
48 Vidlcr 27.
46
54
depiction also portrays the strange way this poetic architecture threatens to
entomb Yeats dive within its confines; the text, as the "place of writing," still
ghosted by the spirit of his voice.
Heaney's earlier article, "Yeats as an Example?" has an ambivalent edge, as
well. A stress is laid, however, on the way Yeats "encourages you to experience a
transfusion of energies from poetic forms thernselves, reveals how the challenge
of a metre c m extend the resources of the voice" (P 1 10). Later in The Pluce of
Wriring. Heaney implies strategies enabling his own voice to exist at a tangent to
the earlier poet 'S. which contradict the underl ying, elective premises of "From
Maecenas to MacAlpine" to a degree. Heaney contends that Louis MacNeice
"initiates a counter-Yeatsian move in Irish poetry" ( P W 47). He cites Derek
Mah0n.s "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford" as a poem which removes itself from
Yeats and his tower to a self-affirming degree ( P W 49). The examples of
Kavanagh and Muldoon also confirm how "a didectic is set in motion in which
the new writing does not so much displace the old as strive to displace itself to an
enabling distance away from it" (PW 55). Heaney, like the pets he comments on,
keeps this "distance" in play in a problematical fashion. retaining a strong
architectural element to his poetics. Despite his rhetorical undermining of Yeats's
stance, there is a sense thai the "ghost of W. B." may revisit if the poetic
architecture is not kept flexible and open.
Heaney's notion of poetry as a threshold space tends to act as a corollary to
his conception of form. He continues to spatialize poetry through his metaphor of
the "frontier of writing," developed discursively in The Redress of Poetry.
Ironically, certain architectural tropes ressert themselves. One of the title essay's
explanations of "redress" concerns "reaffirming poetry as an upright, resistant,
and self-bracing entity within the general flux and flex of language" (RP 15).
Heaney's figura1 language accords poetry tower-like proportions here. The
55
metaphon he uses combine the abstract quality of verse with the corporeality of
56
as an architect who reads the great "literary and psychic ground," of Ireland's
text as a landscape of possibility, Heaney adopts a playfully impenous demeanour
Irish place." denoting a different attitude toward the past, while also looking
57
outward to Ireland's coasdine and the world to corne. Spenser's tower sees
"popery, barbarism and the Dark Ages," for instance. Joyce's tower views the
"archetypal symbol, the onlphulos. the navel of a reinvented order" as well as a
Europe, beckoning with "secular freedoms" (RP 200). For Carricldergus Castle,
on the northemmost tip, Heaney reserves his most telling fusion of anist and
architecture, a tower "sponsored by MacNeice's vision." An "lrish Protestant
writer with Anglocentric attitudes," MacNeice managed to be "faithful to his
Ulster inheritance, his Irish affections and his English predilections." Heaney thus
makes him a Janus figure: god of thresholds, talk and negotiation. A gatekeeper,
he "offen a way in and a way out not only for the norihem Unionist imagination
in relation to some sort of integral Ireland but also for the southern Irish
imagination in relation to the parti tioned north." T h e image of a passage held
open between possible worlds and the "pressure of reality" proves vital.
MacNeice's ability to bend, seeing both sides of the story grounds his tower's
strength in tolerance. a flexibility absent in the pnmal form of the original Yeatsian
stronghold.
Heaney states that his aim was '-to affirm that within Our individual selves we
can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we migbt cal1 the practical and the
poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the
frontier between them is there for the crossing" (RP 203). The siting of the
towers not as defensive vertical cells, but as lmkouts, reading one another.
reverses the Yeatsian trope of heroic denial. By re-imagining the possibilities of
form to actualize other realities, the towers shift from k i n g symbols of splendid
isolation. It is possible to read the quincunx plan as an extended utopian
metaphor. fueled by Heaney's awareness that the 'frontier' can be crossed more
times than double-crossed. He places a "geometry," a "trustworthy f o m " on the
rniddle of Ireland with his quincunx. Whether the order escapes a hierarchical
58
sense that the forms of the "optirni" have k e n singled out as elect is less clear.
T h e "Frontien of Writing" plan puis into practice a concem Heaney raises
when discussing recent Amencan poetry. Noting more generally how with any
conception of poetry, there is "ust a fonn [..- 1 housing a set of harmonies and
balances," he states: "1 think that in the culture and situation 1 corne frorn. you
want to punish the form with some relationship to the a c t u a l . " ~It~is precisely
this punishment he admires in Lowell, praising his poetry as a "site" whose
authority was discovered "not by the assimilation of literary tradition but upon
the basis of the roused poetic voice" (GT 138).The poerns are not "primarily
interested in building stanzas like warehouses" to store opinions. Rather, they
work to convert subject-matter into "an event." aspiring to "project forms and
energies in ternis of it" (GT 139).30 Lowell was not afraid to deconstruct the
architecture of his formal achievernent. T h e punishment emerges in "the spectacle
of a poet taking the crowbar to a perfected style: these new. unmelodious.
i mpacted forms are deli berate rebukes to the classical cadences of the vol umes of
the 1960s" (GT 141). Though mystifying the reader in Heaney, he admires the
poetic necessity behind this move. As with Yeats. a mind-set that renounces
formal perfections represents an ascetic ideal. a willingness to become "formhungry" once more. Lowell's example implies a creative re-engagement with the
living "language of forms." Heaney states that Lowell helped him find a way "to
fortify the quotidian into a work," and in al1 these architectural metaphors the
voice's 'steadfastness' remains key.5 1
The "dominant music" of Lowell at his peak is exemplified, for Heaney, in the
4') Qtd. in
-50Cf. Hcancy's commcnts, espcciaily in rcgard to ihc quincuns of iowcrs pian: "PWLSshould bc thc
altcmativc go\~crnrncnt.Thc poctic intclligcncc of thc counu). should bc thc or/w govenuncnt." Thc
chailcngc is '70 raisc thc brcath ruid projcct a vision." Scamus Hcancy and Dcrck Wrilcoit. "Robcn Pcnn
Warrcn." intcn.ic\v by Christophcr Lydon, Parfism Review 53 ( 1986): 66-12. 69.
5 1 S c m u s H m c y . "Artisrs on An: A n Intcmicw wi th Scamus Hcancy." inicn-icw with Frank Kinahan,
C'riric.ol 1rtqrrir-y 8.3 (Spnng 1=): 405- 14. Qtd. in Corcoran. Senrr~usHenney 128.
59
Mandelstam lines he quotes: "If 1 believe in the shadow of the oak and the
steadfastness of speech articulation, how can 1 appreciate the present age?" (GT
139). In Credi~ingP o e t y the phrase is also invoked, alongside Rilke's spatialized
power j.. - 1 to persuade that vulnerable part of Our consciousness of its rightness
in spite of the evidence of wrongness al1 around it" (CP 53). But here, once more,
- -
1995-%) 49-50.
60
Heaney is refemng to the late poetry of Yeats. reveaiing the depth to which he
has read hirn into a receptive part of his consciousness-like a building, or tower,
'conned'-over the years. An ethical imperative arises from the visionary
cornmitment technique involves, giving form powen beyond the rhetorical
persuasion the quote reveals. Form emerges in Heaney's poetics as a site where
the "projective" capacities of poetry are worked out and the potentially
unassailable "sacred space" is tested, defended and aspired to in figura1 ideals
such as Coole Park. or the temple. As contradictory tensions in his writing reveal,
however. the exact terms of the "covenant" between power and aesthetics
remain undecided.
I had a funous contempt for the gaie that excluded outsiders and
protected the people with elaborately tended gardens, the sprawling,
spacious houses with dogs and servants, the silent superiority of golf with
its contempt for impatience, a serene domain beyond the broken streets
and rusting tin roofs of the fishing village that it went beyond in class and
climate, and now 1 live here, without guilt, without irony, not because 1
deserve to but because Cap is as much my possession and inheritance as
al1 the broken villages of this island, because it is another section of my
palette and because 1 belong with equal certainty to the barefoot lanes of
Gros Islet as 1 do to the dry pastures that 1 keep painting.s3
Collapsing the distinction between "serene domain" and "broken villages,"
Walcott converts the Cap Estate's fonns to "another section of [hisJ palette."
They are absorbed into the language of his art, in a victory over history. He now
lives on the estate in a house built with his Nobel Prize money, spending part of
61
the Great House. Though Cap Estate figures as a site he no longer feels oppressed
by "politically o r aesthetically," to invoke Heaney's earlier comments. Walcott
still debates over whether to separate his house from the surrounding world: "1
d o n 3 want to build a fence even if cows drift in and gnaw at the garden." He
wonders with Heaney how habitable the "perfected formo'can be. and tries to
keep his boundaries fluent and open.
Waicott's various architectural observations shade constantly into his views
on laquage, creativity and the endless possibilities of f o m . The Caribbean, he
states, "[ ... 1 is both a new and an old society. Old in history, new in the
experiment of multi-national concentration in small spaces."ss It is a dichotomy,
rich in implication, that infonns his poetry and poetics. Consistent throughout
Walcott's work has been an ambivalent awareness of both the beauty and the
deprivation of settlernent life in the West Indies. What does it mean to represent
54 Walcoti, "Whcrc 1 Livc" 34.36.
55 Dcrck Walcoti, "An Intcn.ie\v with Dcrck Walcotl," intcn-ic\v mi th Lcif Sjobcrg, Arres 1 ( 193). Rpt.
i n Bacr cd. 79.
62
Journal" he writes: "All shapes, al1 objects multiplied from his, / o u r ocean's
Proteus' (G 28). More perhaps than any other architectural form o n the islands of
the West Indies, it is emblematic of the necessity of making a fresh start out of
nothing. He observes, in relation to this trope:
every race that has corne to the Caribbean has been brought here under
situations of servitude or rejection, and that is the metaphor of the
shipwreck, I think. Then you look around you and you have to make your
own tools. Whether that tool is a pen o r a hammer, you are building in a
situation that's Adamic; you are rebuilding not only from necessity but
also with some idea that you will be here for a long time a n d with a sense
of proprieiorship as well .sg
63
of history. They allow shaping of the formative elements of a fledgling language
that the shack, in its archetypal status of shelter, partakes in as well. Walcott
sways between building and rebuilding here. a major aspect of his approach to
poetic form as a process combining innovation with renovation. His poetry often
draws on other verbal and formai 'materials' for support.
The "language of forms" spoken by the tropical construct of the shack
enables Walcott to read it as a multifaceted metaphor. For exarnple, at the
beginning of "What the Twilight Says: An Overture." the shack assumes a primal
significance in an architectural setting suffused with memory: "When dusk
heightens, like amber on a stage set, those ramshackle hoardings of wood and
rusting iron which circle Our cities, a theatrical sorrow rises with it, for the glare.
iike the aura from an old-fashioned brass lamp is like a childhood signal to corne
horn e."59 This sense of ritual divides Castries from the "true cities" overseas,
where "neons stutter to their hysterical pitch, bars, restaurants and cinemas blaze
with artifice, and Mammon takes over the switchboard [. ..1." Walcott claims the
light "makes our strongest buildings tremble," implying a fragile balance, but also
a poised sanctity. But while the "ailotments of the poor [... J vivid, voluble and
cheap" assume at one level the quality of "gilded hallucinations" for the
observer, a " c o m p t resignation" also arises. He becomes caught up in the
rhetorical effect of the spectacle: "as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted
backyards, under their dusty trees. or climbing to their favelas, were al1 natural
scene-designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made
lyncal. and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into
vi rtue." The architectural landscape assumes an irresistible imaginative power
under the influence of the twilight, which figures for Walcott's transfomative eye
as well. Suspicious of the aesthetic force of this light-headed vision, where
59 Dcrck Walcott, "What thc Twilight S-s:
( 1970:Nctv York: F a m . 1995) 3.
64
poverty cari be read as an "art," and shacks "gilded" into shrines, a starker
appraisal is made.
West Indians "have not wholly sunk into [theirl own landscapes," Walcott
ventures, a condition emblematically suggested by the shack's image.60 He
contends that a sense of lightness and immediacy pervades matters ranging frorn
Carnival to local funerals. Memories of St. Lucia are recalled, stripped of their
nostalgia:
To be boni on a small island, a colonial backwater, rneant a precocious
resignation to fate. The shoddy, gimcrack architecture of its one town, its
doll-sized verandahs, jalousies and lacy eaves neatly perforated as those
doilies which adom the polished tables of the poor seerned so frai1 that the
only credible life was nature. [. ..1 A nature with blistered aspects: grey,
rotting shacks, the colour of the pesant wornan's dress, which huddled on
rocky rises outside the villages.61
Associating the town's apparent fate of rnarginality with the frailties of its
architecture, acceptance at least brings a chance for transformation. When
Walcott relates how nature offers itself as the only "credible Iife." the "rotting
shacks" take on a mediating role. Granted aspects of human and natural worlds
through his imagery, the forms embody a tenacious spirit of survival, a vital logos.
65
us, looking above and beyond our Latin master's head to the woolly green
hills and hi11 shacks over the town knew, sure as daylight, that we weren't
living in an 'urbs32
The embellishment of the Latin chant, and the shift in the columned architecture
of its mnemonic layout, becomes symbolic of the way not only language, but the
tradition and the new. "[Tlhere are still no cities in the islands," he observes,
"Our capi tals are sprawling seaports, market towns." Looking back to his
upbringing again. Walcott remembers how French patois as opposed to Latin
defined a specific bamer: "we had no word for ci ty but 'ville' [...I."64 Describing
this as his "Roman" period, when a provincial and an "imperial eye" were held
in balance, he elaborates:
Any noun on which my eyes rested, a hill across the harbor, a lane
between the fishermen's shacks. silently retumed two sounds. one the
patois, the other English. 1 had my own vision then of the West lndian city,
an amalgam of Athenian columns and African robes (white cotton robes on
6 2 Dcrck Wdcotk "On thc Bcat in Trinidad." New York Tirnes Magnzirir Oct. 5 1986. scc., VI: 38.
"Bcat" 38.
66
white stone steps), an image based on the classics we were k i n g taught.
This imaginary city dilated the scale of Castries to a well-ruled, wellwatered city with a modest square, tarne parks, an architecture that joined
both its Roman-Greek and African sources, just as every object had two
narnes. Four decades and none of this has corne about. Why should it? It
was an ideal, and like the moon itself, a capital in the sky; every one of rny
footsteps pushed this ideal city farther away, so our island cities have
remained untranslated from their patois.65
Walcott's twinned vision of a new city cornes from his literary reading and the
oral influence of the patois. Ultimately the language of the latter triurnphs in the
"untranslated" architecture thai persists, dispiacing the "imaginary [...J ideal
city" for an indeterminate stylistic hybridity. The "imperial eye" observes the
"idand" city and sees "the mess that was made by their colonizers, the waste left
by a degrading history." Streets, "seem noisy but purposeless, their architecture a
exact native replica of what has already been made." The provincial eye sees
something unique, a mode of dwelling that escapes any easy classification.
Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain, depends on the adoption of a similar
viewpoint if it is to be appreciated. It contains the seeds of possibility for the ideal
city Walcott originally imagined, but the patois reflects the diverse mixture of
67
voices forth in its architectural space. The unstable theater of the bazaar
epitomizes the inner life of what Karnau Brathwaite calls "nation language,"
where architecture. (with calypso and Carnival) expresses an energy at odds with
foreign conventions.67 Here Walcott's idea of the vernacular finds its correlation
in calypso as the 'vulgar' voice of "immediacy." Coming from the Latin verna
referring to a home-bom slave and v e r ~ c u l u srneaning indigenous, calypso
becomes a form in which the "abrasive coarseness of Port of Spain's oral
literature keeps its irnmediacy, or, in the Roman sense. its vulgarity."68 "Once that
quality withers from poetry." he adds, "cities cease to be cities-they become
machines. Towns become cities through their oral literature, their political rhetoric,
but also their satire, when it is Sung by hundreds of thousands."~9Vemacular
architecture taps into this same process, the shack syrnbolizing an extreme
instance of tenacious "immediacy." A line can be traced back to the slave
dwellinps of the islands where an indigenous sense of identity found its origin.
Port of Spain's suburbs corne vividly into relief in Wdcott's descriptions, as
he speaks of the "green-shadowed silence of long streets in Woodbrwk and St.
Ann's. with high walls and omate wooden mansions. the Carpenter's Gothic of
AI1 over the city there are proofs of native craftsmanship and cunning. The
high houses survive hurricanes, but can also breathe in the heat. Their
interiors are cool, their wood exhales, but modemity is eating away the rim
of these intricate examples, and what was once common, functional and
organic in the l w k of the city is quickly becoming exotic, archaic. Modem
67 Scc iGunau Bnlhtvai tc. Hisfory of rhe Voice: n e Deveiop~nerirof Nufiorr hri,quuge iri higlopho~re
Cnrihknrt Poerry (London: Ncw Bcacon. 1%).
68 Walcott, "Bcat"43.
69 Wdcott's crossover languagc of crcativc rorrns is implicd: "Port of Spain is thc onc city 1 cm think of
thal dcvotcs itsclf to thc industry of a popuiar rut, which dcmands oripinaliiy c v c q ycar from its Chmival
Jcsigncrs. pocts and musicians. Thcrc is no chaos in its chanctcr. any more than thcrc is in thc prcpantion
of an objcct in art, in 1-cm,in sculpture or music." Walcoir, "Bcai"43.
70 Cf. a rcfcrcncc to thc a v c s of the Waicott housc in Casuics u'ith its "'c;upcntcr's Gothic jokc. A. W. A,
W"(AL 13). Thcsc arc thc initiais of his parcnts. Alis and Warwick.
68
Pon of Spain has some of the ugliest examples of brutal architecture the
traveller will see. Their weight and stupidity s t a d e , when, tuming the
corner of some oid Spanish o r Ponuguese m m shop, the squat stare of a
bank o r an insurance building brutalizes him.
Walcott's emphasis on the "native" serves to privilege the vemacular and its
expression in local building through the prowess of the makers. The houses are
anthropomorphically ingrained with their traits: living, breathing, dealing with the
elements. In a venerable, unassuming reflection of the culture that produced them
the various f o m s persist. M d e m i t y ' s encroachment is figured in terrns of a
woodrot, ironically altering the city's "organic" make-up to the out-of-step and
dien. A "brutal" wave o f architectural style threatens to dislodge the grace of
the old. Such mass-laden buildings affect the "traveller" through an insidious
"leamed through the foot." The trick is to keep going "steadily [. .. 1 without
expecting memorials o r monuments,'' until finally. "the last of the city will corne
through your soles."71 Walcott wills a symbiosis to occur through the process: ''1
should like such a city to be contained in me, my veins its alleys, my heart as wide
as its Savannah." Reversing the drift of the city's architecture toward the
dehumanized. he posits its organic nature within the framework of his own
corporeality, a move which has resonances with the poetry's forma1 organization.
The veins rnay function as "alleys," but they are also potential lines of verse.
Alongside this transfusion of energies he takes from the city's fonn, walking in
Port of Spain offers the chance to encounter both people and the different
7 1 Walcott, "Bat" 44.
69
architectural expressions of their presence. Each represents "at their ordinary
work, fragments from the continents of the wortd: Asia, Europe, Africa, facts as
ordinary as footsteps." These "fragments" are pieces of what Walcott later goes
on to cal1 'epic rnemory,' merged in the tramcultural continuity of forms he sees
defining Port of Spain.
the accepted sense, but no one wants them to be. They dictate their own
proportions, their own definitions in particular places and in a prose equal to that
of their detractors [...1."72 His concem with architecture once again takes on a
lie the "fragments of epic memory"73 Consider. he States, "the scale of Asia
reduced to these fragments: the small white exclamations of minarets or the Stone
balls of temples in the cane fields [. ..J" ( A 5). Massive proportions of time and
space are condensed within this subtle architectural lexicon which has 'broken
away from the main,' in much the same way as poetry he implies. As languages.
they share a deep and intertwined p s t :
There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and
7 2 Dcrck Waicou, l e Anfilles: Fra~rrtentsof Epic Merno- ( N c u York: Fmar, 1993) 15.
73 Walcott's uc of "*cpicwrcsonatcs with the rhctoric of fonns, or 'oraion of powcr' that Wcst Indian
culturc and ils architecture could bc said ro rcprcscnt in conjunction with i i s 'organic' naturc. Cf. his
dcclmtion: "1 comc from a placc that likcs grandeur; it likcs large gcsturcs; it is no1 inhibitcd by flourish:
i t is a rhctorical socicty; it is a socicty of p h y s i d pcrformmcc: it is ri mcicty of stylc. Thc highcst
richic\.cmcnt of stylc is rhetoric, as it is in speech and pcrfomancc." Hirsch 2f7. Architccturc is not stritic
in his conception, but spca)rs; it is pcrformative in naturc. rcsponsivc to thc dictatcs of this ^rhctoricaI
socicty" and thc grcai, %picn range of its coIlcctivc cuItural m c m o q .
70
the process o f poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally
the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own
vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the
language of Ozymandias. libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics,
and churches, univenities, political dogrna, the diction of institutions.
Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. (A 10)
Like the indentured laborers who built the unique minarets and temples of
Felicity through recourse to the "buried" and -'individual" aspects of their own
architectural Iegacies. the poetic voice finds itself in the experience of absorbing
the past, and starting out replenished in awareness from this 'broken' and drifting
or marooned state. From Felicity and its surrounding villages, Walcon tums to
Port of Spain where evidence of such "defiance" of a totalizing language of
empire can be found, in the (ideally) resistant strain of its architectural forms.
Port of Spain is defined by the "sum of its history, Froude's 'non-people"'
he notes. in a reference to the English wnter J. A. Froude's summary dismissal of
West Indian culture in his 1887 book The Englisll in the West Indies. Recalling
his earlier description. Walcon capitalizes on the significance of this melange,
calling the city a "downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized.
polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a
ci ty is, in the New World, a writer's heaven" ( A 12). Though Port of Spain has
"deepened itself' in him, he remains haunted by its disorientating architectural
'brutality.' Staring from a window o n his first morning, he muses,
A retum from Arnerican seductions used to make the traveller feel that
something was missing, something was trying to cornplete itself, like the
stained concrete apartrnents. Pan left d o n g the window and the
excrescences rear-a city trying to soar, trying to be brutal, like an
Amencan city in silhouette, starnped from the same mould as Columbus o r
Des Moines. ( A 13)
Such an "assertion of power, its decor bland." exposes the "provincial ambition
of Caribbean cities where brutal replicas of modem architecture dwarf the small
houses and streets" ( A 22). It debases Port o f Spain's idyllic nature. which
71
(WS 107). Walcott perceives the ideal West lndian city in organic terms through
a vemacular logic. It appears as an intuitively formalized, self-shaped entity in his
descriptions.
A passage from The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Metri-
74 L u d ~ i gWi ttgcnsicin, Tl!e Pliilosopirical hrvestigations, tram. G.E. M. Anscombc ( 1958; Oxford:
Blrick\vcll, 1 0 8 1 ) &. Cl. Wdcort's impcrialistic tropc: "1 t is thc languagc which is thc cmpirc. and prcat
pocts arc not its \.assalsbut ils princes." Dcrck Waicort, 'Thc Musc of Hision.," 1s Massa Da? Buad? cd.
Ordc Ccmm bs (NcH'York: Anchor. 1974) 15.
72
balance of old and new remains viable as a force conforming to inner pnnciples.
For Walcott, the mix of foms and traditions present in Port of Spain is classic,
"stay[ing] new." in the order he envisages.75 But in a move away from the city
and the "guano of white-winged hotels," he notes there still exist "cherishable
places. little valleys that do not echo with ideas. a simplicity of rebeginnings. not
yet corrupted by the dangers of change" ( A 33). Like Felicity, these places are
not "nostalgic sites but occluded sanctities as common and simple as their
sunlight." Where Heaney invoked a "sacred space" in relation to Coole Park,
Walcott envisages uncorrupted places at the insular heart of his Trinidad, over
which the prospect of development looms. He imagines these "sanctities," as
laurel." Walcott's tone remains far from defeatist, however. Representing the
island's inner essence, by extension, the "occluded sanctities" become
"If !-ougo to a pcak anj~vhcrcin St. Lucia. you fccl a simuliancous ncwncss rind
scnsc of tirnclcssncss at thc samc timc-the prcscncc of whcrc you arc." Hirsch 278.
73
ernblematic of a spirit that must be defended. He adopts a similar stance with
regard to poetry in his use of architecture as a metaphor. looking to tradition as
both a source of fortification and a way of approaching the future.
t
interest him as well. These facts affect how a poet symbolically 'dwells in
language,' and how he or she relates to poetry as a fonnally irnagined structure.
His observations on Emily Dickinson provide a notable example. Speaking with
Brodsky, he States that he is unsure whether "you can separate the geography
from the topography of a poem," following up this parailel: "When 1 think of
Emiiy Dickinson's poetry. 1 think of chapel, rose, tomb Stones. organ music in a
chape l . ' T G In effect. this "topography" consti tutes a n architecture of form that
identifies Dickinson with the chapel's structure. Intensifying the metaphor.
Dickinson is figuratively described as "locked in a chapel," a predicament by
necessity curtailing her outlook. The uncannily charged correlative of her stanzas
must suffice. Brodsky suggests the link:
The confines of Dickinson's stanza of course corresponds to the little life
she lived, although it corresponds in a larger sense to the immediate
landscape of that western part of Massachusetts [. ..]. And yet when you
read her verses they are so compact that they explode from inside. [..- 1
Perhaps a poet employs a very tight form simply in order to control that
bursting thing.77
A moral imperative is implied in the way her management of energies signifies a
surface decorum, that shields from the potentially devastating. Dickinson's Blake76 Dcrck Walwtt. in Raoul Granqvist, cd. "*Joseph Brodsh~and Dcrck Walcott in Discussion: 'Thc Powcr
of Poctq,"' Modunin Sprak 1 (1995): 3. ~http://sunsitc.kth.s~lDDS/tvlIund/md~rn~pnk-brd~ky.html~.
77 B r o d s e . "Powcr" 4.
74
like fission of the universal in the particular both governs voice and frees it. The
75
extended into a more overall unifying pattern here, as form is identified with voice
and the motive presence of breath. Stanzaic structure determines the manner in
which the syntactic encounter with the reader-listener will unfold in terms of time,
as i t 'kreates anticipation; and the verbal music, by its chords, its elisions, its
caesuras, delights the ear when expectation is confirmed, but with additional
surprise." Form organizes how this lyrical strain will affirm itself in the ear,
Walcon infers. He expands on his spatialized conception of the poem as a
projective frame of forces in more detail with regard to Frost.
In the same article, "The Road Taken," Walcott notes how Ezra Pound "saw
a classic shape in Frost that made 'it' (poetry) new by its directness and vigor:
Frost's writing achieved a vernacular elation in tone [...1 with a clean ear and a
fresh e y e 3 o Here we see a connection with some of the qualities he prizes in
West Indian culture and the vemacular "language of fonns" it has carved out for
itself. Pound had no alternative, he states, "but to recognize the syntactical
variety in Frost's verse, the vers libre within the taut frarne," due in part to its
"shifting, dancing caesuras.''8[ Trying himself to read this structural integration
of forces, Walcott, like Heaney, turns to choreography for a design metaphor that
will comrnunicate the sense of flux he discerns. But he maintains the reliance on
organizing metaphors which connect to architecture. Just as Dickinson's rhyme
scheme revealed the inner scope of her forms, Frost's personal devastations show
up in his scansion, though "they did not break his meter or pitch it into a rant that
broke its disciplined confinement, for the confinement brought the discipline that
his sorrow needed."82 In refemng to the strict rein on voice within this
"Rmd" 98.
"Road" 116.
76
and dispersed into a spectral amy of possibilities.
In the Frost essay Walcon tends to read poetic form as an analogy for both
poet and habitation, as a 'house of poetry' that gradually engulfs the creator in
morphogenesis. Walcott sees certain p e t s becoming their poetry as life closes in,
and imagination pushes back. Wtth Frost, he detennines, the poems, "essentialize
the life."83 Up to death he "fought his own petrifaction into a monument by dry,
didactic humor." Recalling Heaney's portrait of Yeats consurned by the demands
of his tower, Walcott suggests an image of the old poet making the poem the
spiritual equivalent of a bulwark against the elements: "he could close it tight in
i ts frame like a door against fou1 weather, or light it. like an old lamp, against even
worse weather, the black gusts that shook his soul."84 Conflating poetic form,
house and "soul" to architectonic dimensions. Walcott's figura1 language reveals
how ingrained the relationship lies within his own thinking.85 But there is less
Walcott implies that Robinson Jeffers parallels Frost in this respect. Though
he states they were tme opposi tes, and also opposed to '*Dickimon's confines. or
caves, of parlor and chapel," Frost and Jeffen are described in tenns which
differentially unite them. Both, frorn their respective American coastlines,
"proffer[ed rocky, granite-featured profiles to 'the elements' [ ..-1. They are stone
heads of reassuring integrity."86 Walcott obviously has in mind the Irish-inspired
stone tower Jeffers built at Monterey. While the imperious reach of his long lines
is signified through the figure of waves, dashing their rneter along the shores, a
parallel between the diction of Jeffers in its "barren severity" as the rock coast.
83 Walcott. " R d " 1 15.
84 Walcott. " R d " 1 17.
85 Walcott's usrigc of a long line schcme and rclativcty uniform sri.;Uc structure for thc Iyrical c ~ c u r s i o n s
and mcdirations of his 1997 colIcction. Tite Roirniy. could bc said to reprcscnt a similru rcliancc on thc
spin tlil fonifications of a choscn form. Significandy, the book's publication followcd Walcot's building
of a pcmancnt home on Cap Esutc.
86 Walcort, "Red" 109.
77
and the cracked tonal core of voice as the tower itself emerges. However, if his
diction inhabits the "hawk-height of the sublime," it simultaneously stands as
"stillbom" in Walcott's eyes.87 Symbolizing the fusion of p e t , voice and tower,
the "majestic tone that he considers fit for a stupendous and humbling coastline,"
actually proves a metaphor for his work's legacy.88Tone may be the vesse1 for a
classically severe temperament, but to engage Jeffers's verse is to enter not simply
into his ideas, but into the whole f o m a l enterprise he spent his life writing, or
voicing into being; it is to hear his echo in the structure he named 'Hawk Tower.'
The emblematic reading of p e t s in relation to their poetic architecture comes
through in Walcon's appraisal of Ted Hughes as well. Moving from a
topographical description of his poetry as "lonely and remote," overseen by
rnisty towers and "hieratic stones," he expands the metaphor to take in the
historical landscape of English nature poetry: "Nature, in English poetry before
Hughes, was a decent panacea. One went towards it. entered it Iike a roofless
cathedral. It was a place of contemplation, not terror. It was the benign shrine of
the pathetic fallacy" (WTS 176). Cast as a Romantic ruin, the spatialization of this
aspect of the canon enables Walcon to imagine Hughes as an iconoclastie
architect who renovates according to an intuitive drive. He then evokes the
'comrnon perception' of Hughes, as a "monodic monolith. We cadi stand his
tone," signaling a tie with Jeffers and his tower (WTS 178). However. unlike
Jeffers, Hughes does not "came his own visage from stone." A natural shaping,
free of egocentric dominance, comes to define Hughes and his work according to
Walcott. An organic "openness" characterizes the poetic architecture he
inhabits: "Poets corne to look like their poetry. The page is a mirror, a pool.
Hughes's face emerges through the pane of paper in its weathered openness as
87 Walcott,
"Road" 1 10.
88 Hon.c\.cr, u r i t i n g of Lrkin hc notcs: "In \.crsc, ionc is onc ihing. but in piich lics the scismopphic
accursc- d the individuai voicc. the shadinps as pxsonal as a thumbpnnt" (\KI3 160). Hcrc Walcott p i c h
up on the idca of the voice's uniqueness through thc same mctaphor H w c y uses in "Fecling into Words."
78
both fnendly and honest. It speaks trust. The way a stone appears to speak about
itself' ( W S 178).A window into poetic sou1 through fonn, the face frarned in the
"pane of paper" invites rather than repels the reader-listener. Like Heaney's
"watermarking" notion of technique. an essential patteming is caught in the
lineaments of fom. For Waicott, however, this represents the peak of c d t .
Walcott discems the stony "touch and texture" of Hughes's lines as silent
'speech.' He divines the instinctual shaping tones of voice through his reading.
As with Hughes, Walcon tums to stone for analogies to building and design
89
190. 191).
able to risk rhc lincs ihat cIosc o u t Lowell's "Epiloguc"hc cites: "Pny
Tor thc g r x c of accuracy 1 Vermccr gavc to the sun's illumination" (IYTJ' 106).
90 A humility. in Walcott's c y s .
93 S c c Da~.idMacFad>.cn.Joseph Brodrky atrd [/teRnroqrre ( Moncrd: McGil 1-Quccn 's UP. 1998).
80
Brodksy's structural elements: "the solid architecture of his stanzaic designs, the
intncate triple rhymes, are solid, concrete, without a single heart-flutter of doubt
about their vocation."94 Such cohesion reflects the covenant between force and
f o m befitting a man who "lives inside of poetry" in completeness and through
necessity he adds.95 Yet elsewhen that space is figured as a captivity as well.
'"The Brodskian figure," he suggests, "is a banal figure, in a raincoat, sitting in a
hotel room by himself."96 Unattached and semi-rootless, he is the very figure of
anonymity, enveloped by his craft. To Walcott, Brodsky's ego is best categorized
as anonymous: "this is what makes it classical."97 The classical, to reiterate,
ihai has rcinforccd for mc, al Icast, my own scnsc of what s m z a i c rcsponsibiiity, and rhymc, and al1 thc
rcquircmcnLs of Lhc cffort of writinp vcrse thomughly rcquired. ncedcd." Dcrck Walcoll. "A Tnbuic to
Josc ph B r d s ky 1940-19%." Coli~~nbin:
A Jotrrnal of tirerature nrid Arf 78 ( 1997): 1S.
95 Wdcott also refcrs to Brodse's "houric of the mind." Walcorr, "Magic" 38. Hcancy dcscribcs thc
c\;pcricncc of \,isiting Brodsky in thc study whcrc hc wrotc as compim-able to cntcring "somc kitchcn of ihc
mind." H m c y . "Brodsh-y's Nobcl" 63.
96 crck Wdcott, "A Mcrctlcss Judgc: An [ntcn.icw with Dcrck Walcott(29 Scptcmbcr 1990. London),"
i ntcnVic\rwi th V. Polukhina, L3rodsky T I v o i r ~ hf / t e Eves of His Conre~nprcrries,cd. V. Pol ukhina (Ncw
York: Si. Marns, 1992) 315.320.
97 Wdcott, "Magic" 36.
98 Walcott. "Powvcr"4.
81
And if I were working as a stonemason in a guild, that would be my contribution
to the cathedral."99Similarly to his portrayai of Lowell, he sees himself as helping
"Cul de Sac Valley," as mentioned in the introduction, the metaphor has links
99 iMontcncgro. Bacr, cd. 148.
100 A n csprcssionistic dcpiction 01a caihcdnl was uccd in corincction with thc Bauhaus rnanircsto at thc
mo\uncnt's inccption. Scc Gctcrntcr 242. Cf- aiso Wdcott's ommcnt: "1 ha\x dways bclicvcd in ficrcc.
dc\.otcd ripprcnticcship. 1 hm-c lcarncd thsu from drasvtng. You copy Drcr; you copy thc grcat draftsrncn
bccausc thcy thcmsclvcs did. h v c alsvays uicd to kccp my mind Gothic in its dcvotions [O thc conccpi of
rnastcr and apprentice. The old rnastcrs made ncw mastcrs by the disciplinc of scverity." Sjobcrg. Bacr, cd.
83.
101 Hirsch 274.
82
with film, another of Walcott's passions.102 Film is also a potentially vemacular
means of expression, and in his concem with the "simply" made, and the
"speakable" yet "challenging" quatrain, w e see Walcott looking to connect
with his ideal audience in a language refleciing the idiosyncrasies o f Caribbean
culture and architecture.
Corresponding to the dissolution of identity in craft cornes the paradoxical
discovery of a p e t ' s o w n voice and "accent" in Walcon's view as stated earlier.
This again depends on a spatialized notion of poetry as a construct built in
language, that will retum the 'echo' at the heart of the calling, as it were. As he
d a i m s in the "Poet's Round Table" discussion: "Al1 p e t s try for that ultimate
echo that is their own voice-is it rny o w n voice? [... J every writer w h o has
laboured to authentically hear his o w n voice has his own accent."io-' "[Ajccent"
is defined by scansion for Walcon, keeping the issue squarely within the realms of
forni. 104 The shape of words as much as the stanzaic framework defines the range
of the authentic voice and its "ultimate echo."
as consonants scroll
off my shaving plane
in the fragrant Creole
of their native grain (AT9)
Still. the poem we have is not wntten in Creole. Walcon works instead through a
process of rhetoricd allusion. To "echo this setdement" is here to test the voice
against the resonant language of a Creole architecture, set in the "native grain,"
its timbers shaped by craft. A premise is asserted: io design in a sense true to the
topographie language of the valley is to make fonns analogous to one another.
By the poern's end, each stanzaic form has been translated into a number of
different 'Trames.' Walcott suggests we read each as if it were a prism, in keeping
with his view of Dickinson's verse shapes. With the final quatrains an evocative
connection is made, however. Just prior to the night time image of a shop door as
it "flings a panel of light / on the road" creating a symmetry with the opening
stanza's "panel of sunrise / on a hillside shop," the speaker tums to the hillside
architecture in a closing epiphany:
Shack windows flare.
Green fireflies arc,
igni ting Forestire,
Orlans. Fond St. Jacques,
and the forest runs
sleeping, its eyes shut,
except for one glance
from a lamplit hut;
now, above the closed text
of small shacks that slid
by the headlights: the apex
of a hill Iike a pyramid. (AT 15)
Lit from within, each shack authenticates Walcott's echo in the final plottings of
his stanzaic architecture. As D'Aguiar States. there is a strong attempt to mould
his shapes seamlessly into nature and vice versa.1o.i Yet Walcoa is too self-
1 05 Scc
introduction.
84
conscious about his own role as poetic maker, too aware of the fom-venerating
"history of his craft" to lose perspective. This "lamplit hut" is finally separate
from the forest, observing its behaviour with the wide-eyed alertness of the
speaker himself. The shacks the poem pays homage to in its box-like forms are not
belittled by the cornparison of the hill's "apex" to a "pyramid." The monument
image figures loosely for the sacramentai structure Walcott seeks his "ultirnate
echo" within. visualized as benignly crowning-sacrer. in the French- the shacks
ihat make up its base. An ernblem of one of the sacred valleys within the
imaginative landscape of the West Indies he celebrates. is "occluded" in the
text's closure.
Architecture takes on an organic quality in Walcott's thought, particularly
when the vernacular aspect arises, as in the shack, or Port of Spain. He strongly
associates this indigenous, 'natural' element with language, patois, seeing a
constant threat from mechanical, 'brutal' outside forces. The people are shaped
by architecture and language, in a way that ties in with Heaney's notion of the
latent power wielded in forms. The "fragments of epic mernory" are preserved in
architecture, and this conviction allows Walcott to imaginatively enter into their
structures in his poetry. Generally a continued awareness of form's architectural
potential can be discemed evolving in Walcott's poetics, dong with an
understanding of the metaphorical basis of poetic rnaking in building. Poetic fonn
takes on an emblematic quality in its ability to merge the expressiveness of voice
within its structure, as in the case of Dickinson. and more ambivalently, Jeffers.
But the "weathered openness'? Walcott associates with Hughes final1y becomes
the architectural ideal he most strives to emulate in his poetry-an openness to
history and mernory, the elements and the local inhabitants. that he wishes the
Cap Estate beach house to symbolize.
85
The similar language Heaney and Walcott use to expand metaphorically upon
poetry. making it a temple or univenal granary of truth, develops from the
spatially enclosing aspect of form. Poetry is troped in their imaginations as an
architectural structure, enabling them to analyse and compare the work of other
poets. Architecture thus becomes a way of engaging the past, present, and future
States of poetic making. Heaney and Walcott each desire a state of 'evolution' to
be maintained in poetry (as in architecture): not a mindless pro,oress or
Walcott's "Store Bay." the speaker observes. "1 still lus my house on my back- 1
a mottled, brown shoulder bag / like the turtle's."~o6 This shell is moulded to his
sense of self. But it is also where Walcon, like Heaney, is forced to carry his
writing, the material place of form to which his voice is ultimately tied. and where
his subjective purpose rests.
In the next chapter the way Heaney and Walcott represent architecture and
react to its power in various poerns will be discussed in relation to this mobile
sensibility. The slightly uncanny, mutual 'conning' aspect regarding the
imaginative encounter with architecture also surfaces. Architecture is used to
engage history and memory. An ambivalence toward a constraining idea of home,
1 (16 Dcrck Walcoti,
C h a ~ t eTwo:
r
"Lost. U n h a ~ ~ and
v . at Home": The Architecture
Voiced from a Jutland h g , Heaney's phrase from 'The Tollund Man" raises
the question of what exactly 'home' might represent in relation to the
architectural issues in his and Walcon's work. 1 An anti-nostalgic homesickness
for lreland is registered in this line that problematizes where 'home' may rest. The
speaker's sense of displacement cornes through, yet so d w s an acceptance of his
alienated condition. Home for now is an abstract space Heaney wanders in and
w i t e s out of that is detached from the other, island-bound community. Poetic
inspiration, in the guise of these lines, seems to be located in upheaval, in interna1
exile-the renunciation of home for a deferred homecoming and for the cold
comfort of the *house' one carries. As Heaney states. "Whatever poetic success
I've had has corne from staying within the realm of my own imaginative country
and my own voice."z Both Heaney and Wafcott maintain an ambivalent, restless
relationship with their places of origin, questioning the fixed and enclosing forms
of home and culture through architecture. Architecture becomes a metaphor for
the unhornely sense of estrangement each feels possessed by o n occasion.
An emotive core buned in memory, home. in its broadest sense, joins certain
abstract and material characteristics into a single (mu1ti)cultural structure of
imagining wherein people and architecture fonn a perceived unity. Upholding
heritage and national identity. and helping frame the image in space and time.
2 "Scam us Hcancy
1 9 8 1 ) 69.
88
connections to the earth and to comrnunity in a more elusive manner. A creative
detachment is required, a dissociation of perspective. Heaney states, "being a
poet is to be self-bom at a distance. starting again," implying that aiienation is a
process without end.3 But this distancing coexists with a feeling of responsibility.
"So much in Ireland still needs to be done," he notes in this context, "the
definition of the culture, and the redefinition of it."4 With dienation comes a
distancing from home that makes architecture readable in other. defamilarzed
tenns.
Alienation is inevitably a part of what Mark Williams and Alan Riach cal1 the
"rich complexity of reference worked into the poetry of those who choose to
start out from that sense of displacement, of unhousing. which is part of the
general condition which t e m s Iike postmodem or pst-colonial attempt
inadequately to account f o r 3 But this runs the risk of ovenimplifying matters, in
the implication that "unhousing" constitutes a deliberate rhetorical strategy. The
'designs' of Heaney and Walcott are far more ambiguous in nature. They oscillate
between accepting their changing domestic and communal places, and appearing
trapped and at odds with the intransigent cultural patterns and historical
encumbrances that often underlie surface realities. It is a tension that informs the
abstract space the poetry offen, keeping it preoccupied with home. but in a way
tinged with the "sad freedorn*'of the Tollund man, or the "bitter devotion" of
Walcott .s "Return to D'Ennery, Rain."6 Walcott attests. however. that "al1
island artists" face an "inevitable problem [. .- 1 the choice of home or exile, self-
3 Brodsky.
89
realization or spiritual betrayal of one's country. Travelling widens this breach."'
Raising the necessary indecision between home and exile, Walcott hits on a crux.
The "breach" he speaks of becomes the site of an irresolvable struggle for
articulation that keeps each poetic voice pitched to its own frequency. Creative
complacency is staved off by tuming that emotive sounding 'exile' inward,
domestic origins, they reved architecture as both settling and unsettling in nature.
It represents a sheltering spirit that in turn invites rebellion and unease. This
The activity of writing originates very, very far down, and is affected by
everything in your life, and it slzould affect everything in your life. 1 found
in Glanmore [. .. 1 some kind of coming into home4 discovered there that
you had to be really coherent, and you had to be in eamest, and
significantly that was the fint place 1 was able to write about the house 1
was living in. That was because Glanmore was like the original place. But
talking about the comfort of life and home, I'm afraid of cornfort, and at the
same time 1 believe that man was made for it too. 1 would love to be able to
write a poetry that had some kind of sureness and fullness and generosity,
yet wasn't complacent in any way.8
Though Glanmore offers a "home," he resists its potentially smothering
"comfort." As the last sentence suggests, poetry provides an objective
correlative. A link between poetic form and the actual house occun here. as if
writing the "Glanmore Sonnets" and "Glanmore Revisited" sequences relocates
the structure in Heaney's memory.
Re-irnagining home calls for a new architecture of the spirit. "I think there's
some kind of psychic energy that cries out for a home," Heaney responds to a
90
query regarding his occasionally arcane subject matter, "[. ..) you have to build
the house for it with the elements of your poetry, and that imagery has to have a
breath of life in i t 3 This resonates with the Rilke analogy he likes to invoke that
poetry builds "a temple deep inside o u r hearing" (RP xvii-xviii). Ptic form, a
vessel echoing with voice, provides a 'house' for those energies. But other
"cries" keep coming-the threshold of each dwelling musr be crossed for another,
as the p w t is compelled to resist any final coming to rest, and maintain an
openness to the creative possibilities of upheaval and renewal. Similarly, Walcott
speaks of the "retreat, not from fame but into a craft," using craft here as a
vessel-a Dantesque metaphor for the sea-joumey of a life lived in forms. Through
the housing of self in poetry as a version of a carapace o r shell that can be shed,
the promise of home is preserved.
9 Haffcndcn i6.
10 Dcrck Walcott, T h c Figure of Crusoc: On thc Thcmc of Isolation in Wcst indian Wri ting," L x t u r c
dclivcrcd at thc University of thc Wcst Indics in thc Open Lccturc Scrics, 27 Oct. 1965. Pub. Hamncr. cd.
40.
91
celebrate with corrosive wit the powers that isolation and solitude bestow, setting
an example to a formative. hybrid culture that rnust create its own, refreshed
knowledge of itself.
As Heaney contends in The P k e of Writing. "if one perceptible function of
poetry is to write place into existence, another of its functions is to unwrite it"
92
the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard
has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried
city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up k i n g plants. (P 41)
In -'DiggingWthe notions of "divination" and "revelation" are placed in uneasy
connection with underlying metaphors for 'knowing' and regeneration, all latent
93
intemalization appears part of a wider process of renunciation. If the cuts through
"living roots" signify a severance from the idea of the pen as gun, a cleavage
noted in the dropping of that metaphor from the final stanza, they also signai a
deeper emancipation from the everyday reality of home. 16
Heaney's "curt" digging marks a figurative penetration into the womb of the
imagination. Metaphorically, he aspires t o go funher down than culture-bound
roots can reach. breaking through into a subterranean architecture of running
streams. and molten energies. The house of the poem is transfonned into a
symbolic Stone omphalos that seeks to divine these currents as it rests atop
thern.17 As Heaney States, writing "Digging" had the "force of an initiation" for
him (P 42). The imagery of breaking through "roots" into other imaginative
structures signifies a quest for re-definition through poetry itself. Yet, the
interplay between the earth and his imagination relies on the architecture of the
writing place to frarne his perspective, and rnetaphorically open up the ground of
'
pastness' beneath.
Heaney spatializes the imagination in several other lyncs, giving it power to
create and wield new forms. With "In Small Townlands," painting the landscape
bnngs fonh "splintered lights" from the brush's "wedge." These cleansing forms
of light "slice like a spade 1 That stnps the land of fuzz and blotch, 1 Pares clean as
94
the nib filed on a salt wind" (DN39).18Such tropes express a desire to give
physical space a mental correlative, setting it at a tangent to reality. Apart from
such images of creativity, however, a more arnbiguous relationship emerges with
the structures Heaney observes, implying a Iink with the unconscious. The title
poem, "Death of a Naturalist," evokes a "flax-dam" festering in the "hem / Of
the townland," nearby where the young speaker draws jampots of frogspawn to
be arranged on "window-sills at home, 1 On shelves at school" ( D f f3). Captive to
his fears, the invasion of the dam by 'hngry frogs" figures for the advent of the
"great slime kings" in his mind (DN4).A sense that the holding force of organic
forms is being breached is caught in the nauseous panic of the speaker. His
experiments with frogspawn are revealed as transgressions against a natural order
carrying deadly implications. A rnalign center on the landscape, the flax-dam
takes dominion everywhere. to invoke Wallace Stevens, rather than the jam-jar, its
natural architecture a metaphor for an unspecified sense of malaise. 19
In "The Barn" there is a continuation of the imagery that equates the inner
space of the mind wi th architectural structures. Paradoxically the ban, the rustic
storehouse of sustenance, becomes a deadly prison in Heaney's formal outline. A
near-gothic terror seems to pervade memory of the place. As sacks of threshed
corn, "piled like grit of ivory / Or solid as cernent'' transform into "great blind
rats" over the poem's course, an uncanny feeling of the structure as entombing
the speaker emerges. Heaney walks us into the barn like a story-teller creating an
atmosphere. His observations recall a latent violence, lingering from the pst:
"The musty dark hoarded an armoury 1 Of farmyard implements, hamess, ploughsocks" (DN 5). The five tightly-packed quatrains stake out the barn's cold,
estranging architecture as i t resonates within the speaker's mind:
1 8 Cr. dso thc archi tcctunli-mtion in 'Thc Chhcr Sidc" Hcancy uscs: "His brain \\.asa whilcwashcd kitchcn
I hung wiih tcu. s\vepr tidy I as thc body O' the kirk" (WO 25).
1 9 Scc Wallsicc Stcvcns. "Anccdotc of rhc Jar," The P a h ~
ar rlw Er~do/riie Mirid: Selec~etPoerns m ~ dcr
engagement. Form organizes this dread, the insidious trope of the barn also
-
2 0 In r c g u d to thc statc Hcancy's spcri)icr cntcrs hcrc. cf. Vidlcr's rcmaks: " A sa conccp; [...1 rhc uncanny
ha, no1 unnaiudly, found its mciiiphorid home in architecture: first in thc housc, hauntcd or not. thai
prctcnds to afford thc utmost sccurity whilc opcning iisclf to ~ h sccrct
c
intrusion o f tcrror. and thcn in thc
city. whcrc \\.ha[ was oncc wallcd and intimatc, thc confirmation of community-onc thinks of Rous-mu's
G c n c ~ x - h a bccn rcndcrcd stranpc by thc spatial incunions of modcrnity. In both crises. of coursc, thc
'uncann)' is no1 a propcrty of thc spacc itsclf nor can it bc provokcd by any particular spatial conformation;
i t is, in its acsthetic dimcnsion. a rcprcscntalion o f a mcniai satc of projection thai prcciscly clidcs the
boundarics of thc rcai and the u n r d in ordcr t o provokc a disturbing ambiguity. a slippapc bctwcen w k i n p
and drcaming." Vidlcr 1 1. Rclatcdty. not only "Rouscau's G c n c v s " but Walcott's Port of Spain is
suggcsrcd hcrc. In citics hc oftcn confronts '7hc shaows of plriss-faccd toivers don-n ci-cninp strccts." as in
'The Scason of Phanlasmal Pcacc" (Ff98).
7 1 Hriffcndcn 69.
96
standing in for the haunting of Heaney's culture historically, by terror.
Strangely, this depressive, claustrophobic air is carried over into the extemal,
'natural' world in "Dawn Shoot," where the five nonce stanzas trace a pastoral
setting pervaded by an institutionaiized sense of fear: "Clouds ran their wet
mortar, plastered the daybreak / Grey" (DN16). The sky mirron the landscape in
a collusive manner: 'The plaster thinned at the skyline, the whitewash / Was
bleaching on houses and stables.'' Cattle. "watching. and knowing," evoke an
atmosphere of surveillance heightened by the snipe hunters' stake out of the den
in the invaded meadow. Given Heaney's love of hiding places-"Al1 children
want to crouch in their secret nests" he declares-the quasi-military operation on
the snipe's retreat has added significance (P 17). Despite the speaker's callous
language, an undertone irnplies he identifies with the snipe. its impeded sense of
place. and the coven existence to which it is consigned.22 The poem's evocation
of a drab architecture that contains and orders the experience of hunting actually
reveals Heaney's alienation from the ritual. It extends a metaphor connected with
what he calls "our sensing of place. It was once more or less sacred. The
landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs. implying a systern of reality
beyond the visible reaiities" (P 132). That "system" has k e n disrupted and COopted, the young hunters turned mercenary killers: "we did not bother to cut out
the tongue. /The ones that slipped back when the al1 clear got round 1 Would be
first to examine him"
consciousness, as within the formal outlines of the stanzas, the snipe hunt is
revealed in a defamiliarizing Iight through Heaney's choice of language.
Imprisonment within an ideological constnict is conveyed.
97
architecture-the 'fortress mentality0-in relation to Ireland as home. Notable for its
forma1 mimesis of huddled density is "Storm o n the Island," where the adoption
of an Aran Island persona also draws in other voices under assault from the
elements:
We are prepared: we build Our houses squat,
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
This wizened earth has never troubled us
With hay, so, as you see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees
Which might prove company when it blows full
Blast: you know what 1 mean-leaves and branches
Cm raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you listen to the thing you fear
Forgetting that it pummels your house too.
But there are n o trees, n o natural shelter.
You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs,
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Tumed savage. We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo.
We are bombarded by the empty air.
Strange. it is a huge nothing that we fear. (DN38)
Long dug-in against a hostile environment, the islanders rnerge with their
"squat" dwellinps, incarcerated by the storm and by an an ill-defined "fear."
Inviting complicity on one hand ("you know what I mean") the conversational,
yet evasive tone implies a stoic waiting-out of the weather's assault. Elemental
"Space" takes on a charged quality, for despite k i n g a "hug~nothing," it
98
a gantry's crossbeam, I Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw. / Speech is
clamped in the lips' vice" (DN28). Reified in his features, one side of the power
structure informing the sectarian problem in Northem Ireland is set, "strong and
blunt as a Celtic cross." Again, behind the anguished tone of a stanza from
Heaney 's "An Open Letter," written to protest his inclusion in an anthology of
British verse, lies another reading of architecture as symptornatic of an underlying
cultural malaise:
Traumatic Ireland! Checkpoints, cairns,
Slated roofs, Stone ditches, ferns,
Dublin squares where sunset bums
The Georgian brickThe whole imagined country moums
Its lost, erotic
A isling life.23
former wholeness. The lines leading up to this stmza speak of Heaney 's "deep
design." his desire to "be at home / In my own place and dwell within 1 Its proper
name," yet that "name" is made
remembers how he would clear wells, one with a "rotted board top" too deep for
reflection, another whose bottom offers up his "white face" like a moon after he
23 Scamus H m c y . A ~ & ~ I I I'rter
198)) 10.
99
has "dragged out long roots from the soft rnulch." Heaney plays on the forrnal
correlation between these drills into darkness and poetry's thnist into deep
imaginative terrain: "Others had echoes, gave back your own cal1 / With a clean
new music in it." But a renunciation occurs, the speaker declaring:
disem bodied images of a home cohere within the frame of a stable. sounded
through the imagination:
59).
1O 0
Rhyme, and the sparse stanzaic form supply hints of an underlying logic here, as
Heaney gestures at the presence unsettling the horse.25 Opening out "NightPiece" is a reference in ' T h e King of the Ditchbacks" from Station Island. The
speaker asks, in one of the invocations "dared" to a shadowy figure, if he is the
"one who lay awake in darkness a wall's breadth / from the troubled hoofs?"26
He describes this as one of the "Dream fears" he "inclined towards" and in the
exchange of identities that characterizes the poem, turns to follow him, "as if 1
were coming into my own. 1 remembered I had / been vested for this calling."
"Night-Piece" can be read as an invocation of a "stealthy nistling" in Heaney's
spirit: the cal1 of this furtive Sweeney persona. a "denless mover" whose
presence haunts him through the stable's enigmatic agency (SI 56).
Door into the Durk taices its title from the sonnet "The Forge" where a
blacksmith's workshop is the setting. The opening lines establish a sense of the
structure: "Al1 I know is a door into the dark. / Outside, old axles and i ron hoops
The "altar" of
rusting: / Inside, the hamrnered anvil's short-pitched ring" (007).
the anvil, is located "somewhere in the centre, / Homed as a unicom." But when
the speaker observes how the blacksmith "expends himself in shape and music"
there and "leans out on the jam b" to talk, a correspondence with this worker in
the "language of forms" develops. Heaney 's sonnet forms an architecture
responsive to the semi-mythical overtones of his "music," as a concise shape also
made to an old template.27 Darkness plays a strong role in "The Peninsula" as
well. A car journey signifies a transient state, insulated from the extemal world:
35 In "Gonc." ihc ncst p m . thc sinistcr fcciing is mainciincd with thc horsc's suddcn disappcarincc: "His
hot reck is lost. I Thc placc is oid in his must" (DD 1).Thc stable is lcft "unmade."
36 S c m u s Hcanc~\..Szario~tIslmrd (London: Fabcr. 1%)
57.
27 Cf. 'Thc Thatcher." Rcprcscntcd as an artisan, hc is transformcd into alrnost rnythical tcrms as a pattcrnmakcr as hc rcplaccs thc cottagc roof. Hc uses a "light ladder- and suples madc for "pinning down his
u.orld. hmdful by h d f u l n (DD 8). L ~ i n ghiddcn. "Couchant for days on s d s abovc thc raftcrs," thc spckcr
obscnecshim wca\-in@"a slopcd honcycomb," Icaving thc onlookcrs "gaping at his Midas touch." Hcruicy's
"rigging" of thc proccss in his four quatrains shows the thatchcr complcrciy immcrscd in his work. a
iriurnph of tcchniquc.
101
"so you will not arrive // But pass through, though always skirting landfaIl" (DD
9). This vantage point frames "horizons" and the "ploughed field" which
"swallows the whitewashed gable / And you're in the dark again." The final
stanza carries an austere note of resolution, as the time to "drive back home, still
with nothing to say" cornes. But the experience has led to a fresh way of
perceiving forms: "now you will uncode al1 landscapes I By this: things founded
clean on their own shapes, / Water and ground in their extremity." Reading
architectural structures partakes of the will to "uncode," to forge a dari ty of line.
"In Gallarus Oratory" is ambivalently steeped in a coilective memory Heaney
attempts to sound, with the poem itself built on a contrast between darkness and
illumination. Fourteen-centuries old, the tiny chapel's atmosphere is internalized
The turfstack metaphor centen the intenor at the "heart" of mral life. While a
reference to dropping to hell is clear, the idea of falling subordinate to the "heart
of the globe" also captures a reference to the insidious colonizing power of
Elizabethan England to make "reduced creature[s ]"of the Irish. Heaney implies
that this theater in memory he sets up may share a link with the Globe in London.
102
on the "worshipper.'~gThe allusion to a line from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, "O,
Heaney rvntes that some poems (Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 is his example) have
"openings at their centre which take the reader through and beyond" (GT 15).
The white space between the two stanzas figures for such a 'visionary' opening
mctaph\sical conccit. Callin? her a "mographet." h c I m c n t s hcr c col laps cd sphcrc": 'That c\.ictcdworld
Il Contncts round its histoq-, its scar." s q i n g of hcr husband: "Hc gucsscd a globe bchind your stcady
rnound" (/II)19).T h c spatial is again thc prcrcquisitc structure f o r a ccmporai orientation of language.
29Christophcr Marlowc, Doc-IO? Fatcsrus. cd. John D. Jump (London: Mclhucn. 1%2) xis. 145. 100. 1 am
indcbtcd to J o h n Reibcianz for pointing o u t the source of Hcancy's allusion,
1O3
allusion to his spirit haunting the "charred gables," and the state of the walls.
While a deserted prison is called to mind, aspects of another forlorn shelter now
30 Scc Thomas Cahill. How the Irish Snved Civi1i:ation: The Unrold S t o q of lrulnnd's Heroir RoleJrarn
tlw F d l of Rome to the Risv of Medieval Ewopr (NcH. York: Anchor, 1995) n. paf.
3 1 Scamus Hcancy, "Lasr Camp," New Stntesrrwn 12 (Junc 1970): 840.Qid. Molino 62.
104
the trudging circuit of the "we" he invokes, the new camp made a metaphor for
communal imprisonment in a foreboding social structure. But the dream aspect of
the poem also marks the sentiments out as a waming Heaney is making to himself.
1O5
The camp, and the graffiti-covered walls point t o how easily the trope of
confinement could become a metaphor for an acquiescent state of mind. As the
title Wintering Out suggests, the constraints of architecture in association with
the idea of home are questioned and rejected in certain poems in this collection.
The notion of taking refuge-a rest in the face of advenity-arises as a senous
option for Heaney.
T h e pressure of the overarching political situation in Northem Ireland in 1972
forced Heaney and his family to live more covertly, a move reflected in the fivepart "A Northem Hoard." "Leaf membranes Iid the window" of the house with
sinister effect in the first part, "Roots" (WO 29). Architectural images flash up
ambiguously in the night-time of the poem's imagining. Punctuated by the "din I
Of gunshot, siren and clucking gas," catastrophe lurks at the edge of the houses:
Out there beyond each curtained terrace
Where the fault is opening. T h e touch of love,
Your warmth heaving to the fint move.
Grows helpless in our old Gomorrah,
We petrify or uproot now. (WO 29)
Heaney's remorse at this self-fulfilling prophecy of upmoting becomes the
animating strategy behind "NO Man's Land." the next poem in the sequence: "1
deserted, shut out / their woundsTfierce awning" (WO 30). Rhetorically he asks:
"Must 1 crawl back now, / spirochete, abroad between / shred-hung wire and
thom [. .. ] ?" T h e house becomes a place of horror. where he will be forced "to
confront [hisl srneared doorstep" and "lumpy dead." Neutraiity offers only a
dangerous lirnbo, cold comfort in the face of this threshold, figured as a sacrificial
altar o r the entrance to a chamel-house. From this quandary Heaney imagines the
"sad freedom" of the "Toilund Man," lost and at home in his own "old mankilling parishes," a fate not unlike that of Sweeney, as will become clear (WO 37).
The third poem in the sequence, "Stump," equates the speaker's state with
1O6
the Iast poem, strives to make sornething cohere out of al1 this upheaval. Fire now
becomes a necessity for suwival in the decimated. imaginary landscape his
persona is forced t o inhabit. Over a series of tentative, sporadically rhyming
couplets flints are rnetaphorically tried for their powen:
Cold beads of history and home
We fingered, a cave-mouth flarne
Of leaf and stick
Trembling at the mind's wick. ( WO 33)
Faith in the old sureties barely raises a flicker. Taken back to the threshold of a
cave. from this exposed place he asks: "What could stnke a blaze /
tundra's whistling bnish // With new history. flint and iron, / Cast-offs, scraps, nail.
canine" (WO 34). Ironically, the array of items is directly drawn alrnost word for
word from "Last Camp." But unlike the "detritus" coveted by the bellicose
persona of that poem, the speaker of "Tinder" calls these fragments "ncw
history." Seeking to animate perception, he re-reads the makings he is left with, a
reflection of the way Heaney himself revises "Last Camp" for his "Northem
Hoard."
Several other poerns deal with the idea of entrapment and intemrnent in
1O7
Wintering 0 ~ 1 . 3 2In North. however, Heaney offers one of his most architectural
versions of the motif. A built structure again becomes the means of entering into
an engagement with deeper historical and ideological issues related to Ireland. In
the world if he could / find the right place to position his lever. Billy Hunter said I
Tarzan shook the world when he jumped down out of a / tree."33 Heaney takes
his title from Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry," in which the p e t ' s imagination is
granted extraordinary powers of creation and upheaval.3' Continuing to invoke
those fantastic poaers, the speaker acts the role of heroic rescuer in his dream:
1 sink my crowbar in a chink 1 know under the masonry
of state and statute, 1 swing on a creeper of secrets into
already expected (N 66). Though his designs place him at the situation's heart3 2 Sec "Byc-ChiId," for c.xamplc. tvhosc cpignph rcads: "He ~ v dircoverrd
m
in the Ite~ihorcsuwhere she had
corifined hirn. He wvm incapable of sayirig anyhing." His photo is r c d l c d "sttll 1 Glimpscd likc a rodcni 1
On the floor of my mi nd, Il Little moon man. 1 Kcnnellcd and faithful 1 At thc foot of thc yard" ( WO, 59).
"Gocxf-night" atso sccms to addrcss bis confincrncnt. rcading dmost as a "rcmotc mirnc" in imrigining the
bird-boy's vicw: "A Iatch lifting an edged dcn of lipht / Opcns across ihc yard. Out of thc Io\\ door 1 Thcy
stwp into ihc honcycd corridor. 1 Thcn walk stmight through thc wall of ihc dark" { \ Y 0 61).
33 Scamus Hcanc!., North ( 1975: London: Fabcr. 1P-)
50.
34 Shclky daims that pocts are thc "unacknowlcdgcd lcpislators of the world," striting: " p t s . or ihosc
\\.ho imaginc and csprcss this ~ n d ~ t r u c t i bordcr.
lc
arc no1 only tbc auihors of lanpage and of music. of ihc
dancc and architccturc. and s m t u q - . suid painting: thcy arc the institutors of Iaws. and the foundcrs of civil
society. and thc invcntors of the arts of lifc. and thc tcachcrs. who draw into a certain propinquit? with thc
bcautiful and thc truc, that partial sipprchcnsion of thc agcncics of thc invisik uorid which is callcd
religion." Pcrcy Bysshc Shclley, "A Dcfcncc of Fbctry," Romantic Poe- nrui Prose, cd. Harold Bloorn and
Lioncl Trilling (Ncw York: Oxford UP, 1973) 762.74.
1O8
mimetic function by the final verse: "In the cell, 1 wedge myself with outstretched
arms in the / corner and heave, 1jump on the concrete flags to test / them. Were
those your eyes just now at the hatch?" The form insinuates that the speaker is
caught inside the text, inviting our complicity in his predicament.
According to Shelley, poetry is at once "the centre and circumference of
knowledge.'rs But if the pet-hero fonns the focus here. the steady reduction in
the space of action leaves hirn a diminished figure, ineffectually tesiing his
bounds. walled in by expectations. Heaney's extended metaphor locates him
wedged unhappily home, "slumbering" at the "very hub of systems" to quote
"Frorn the Land of the Unspoken36 Heaney's metaphors of entrapment in
social constraints are reified in the architectural images of the poem's setting.37
Poetry. Shelley adds, "strips the veil of farniliarity from the world, and lays bare
the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms."38 It is not
"beauty" which is laid bare here, though, but the way reader and poet are
implicated together at society's core through the pnson metaphor, almost as
guard and detainee. After penetrating the prison with levers and wedges, the
poet-hero struggles to extricate himself through the same means. But the process
may simply be repeated if he escapes. Like the tundra site in "Last Camp" and
35 Shcllcjp758.
36 Scamus Hcncy. The Haw hnrerti (London: Faber. 1987) 18.
3 7 Thc significance of thc Bastille in the poem ma)- alludc to Wordsworth's cspcricnccs in r c v o l u t i o n q
Francc. Cf. Bataille's commcnl, however, "monuments inspire socially acccptablc bchaviour. and d i c n a
\.cc r d fcar. The stonning of the Bastille is symbolic of this statc of affairs; it is difficuft to cxptain this
impulsc of thc mob othcr than by the animosity thc pcoplc hold against the monuments w'hich arc thcir
truc mastcrs." Gcorgc Baiaille, ^Architccturc." Lcach, cd. 21.
38 Shcilc,. 759.
1O 9
"Tinder," the prison is a "domain" Heaney must "enter and re-enter," centered
in collective memory. Yet it is also emblematic of the way poetry isolates and
alienates Heaney from his "wronged people," as much as it allows him to enter
into their plight. Architecture provides the cultural analogue for stnicturing this
inside-outside dichotomy which he both maintains and deconsiructs in ''The
Unacknowledged Lcgislator's Drearn."
The fint poem in the "Singing School" sequence. ' T h e Ministry of Fear."
makes the "lonely scarp / Of Si Colurnb's College" (where Heaney boarded for
six years) an outward symbol of the oppressed sense of "exile" the young
speaker feels (N 57). By the final lines, the whole atmosphere is dominated by an
imaginary structure of intimidation: "al1 around us, though / We hadn't named it,
the ministry of fear" (N 59). Heaney relates the feeling to the indoctrinating
powers of the English language and its enforcen. Language acts as a meeting
point where identity is suddenly subject to interrogation and review. But it also
becomes a surreptitious place of resistance in its poetic form. a site of
displacement: "Ulster was British, but with no rights on / T h e English lyric." With
the metaphor of the "ministry of fear," Heaney alludes to the social architectures
of containment he feels oppressed by and often undermines in his work.
In "Exposure," the
1st
domain is signified. Set in Wicklow, the ten unrhymed quatrains trace the
speaker's thoughts as he walks through "damp leaves. / Husks, the spent flukes
of autumn." then sits "weighing and weighing" his "responsible frisfia" (N 66).
The prison-camp image reappears as he imagines a hero, "On some muddy
compound, I His gift like a slingstone 1 Whirled for the desperate." As in earlier
poems, a type of renunciation and internalization ocurs. T h e "diamond
absolutes" strengthen the resolution the speaker makes, divorcing him from the
structures of home, yet aligning him with archetypal figures from the past:
rnernory hatched them, 1 As if the unquiet founden walked again [. .. 1 Profane and
bracing as their instruments."-ll The speaker asks rhetorically: "Who's sorry for
our trouble? / Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves / In rain and
clcrul~~.
and you think." Haffcndcn 7 1.
40 Hcancy is h i n a i c d by ihc uncuiny aspcct of the prcscn-cd M i e s . so dit^ to the e>.cwhcn boughi out
or thcir naturai 'mskct~.''ThGrauballc Man" ruid othcr pocms will bc rcfcmcd to in chaptcr ~brcc.
4 1 Scarn us Hcrincy. Field Work (London: Fabcr. 1979) 1 2.
111
conception of inert, petrified human existence-as if transfixed in h o m r by a
Medusa-with stone cottages. Heaney alludes to the pervasive spirit of this
situation in the third stanza: "In that neuter original loneliness / From Brandon to
Dunseverick I I think of srnail-eyed survivor flowers." Again, the architecturai
becomes an entry-point into a "buned life of feelings" as this "loneliness" is
made to resonate with the collective memory. But the mood alten with the sight
of another dwelling: "1 see a stone house by a pier. / Elbow room. Broad window
light. I The heart lifts." A girl "walks in home" to the speaker there with a gift of
food. the implication k i n g that she is one of the "survivor flowers" envisaged.
In the second poem in the sequence. "Sibyl," the image used for speech in
the opening Iine: "My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge," sustains the
trope of the stone-dwellers who have al1 but melded with their habitations (FW
13). The speaker asks the sibyl: '"What will become of us?"' She predicts to
Heaney's Aeneas: '"1 think our very form is bound to change. / Dogs in a siege.
Saunan relapses. Pismires. // Unless forgi veness finds its nerve and voice' 1.. .J ." A
metarnorphic element is thus invoked, indicating a reality buckling under stress,
and transforming its inhabitants. "'The ground we kept our ear to for so long.
99
she continues, "'1s flayed or cailoused, and its entrails / Tented by an impious
augury.'" The roots figured here by the '"entrails"'
bleeding tree."' But in the notion of a punishrnent inflicted on the earth, the
architecture of the stone-dwellers is implied, especiall y the "Profane and bracing"
image of the rifle-toting men on the hill. A mythical perspective on Irish problems
is evoked, similar to Heaney's use of the ritual killing grounds in North.
The speaker finds hirnself on Devenish in the last poem. "At the Water's
"a cold hearthstone on Horse Island," where he watches the sky "beyond the
112
years he and his family spent there. In the ten poems of the "Glanmore Sonnets,"
the tensions implicit in maintaining this relatively settled existence resurface in his
forms. dismpting syntax and supplying dark imagery. The first sonnet's opening
line: "Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground" carries a strong hint of this
discornfort, with its convulsive caesura slicing through the syntactic flow, forcing
a catch in articulation (FW 33). The "gmd life" is not al1 it appean, as the
speaker halts again: "Wait then.. .Breasting the mist. in sowen' aprons, / My
ghosts corne striding into their spring stations." In the third poem he refers to the
"strange ioneliness" of the Glanmore situation, before the ensuing sonnets drift
i nto childhood mernories (FW 35). What should be a sanctuary, offering a warm
42 Cf. anothcr urgc for rcnunciation in 'The Badgcrs." whcrc thc speakcr poscs thc qucsuon:
1s i t ro choosc 1 not to love tbc lifc wc'rc shown?" ( D Y 26).
"Hou1pcri1ous
43 Thc namc 'hcdge schaol' dcrivcs from the scvcnteenth and cightecnh centuries. In ordcr to cvadc the law
on Catholic cducirion, Irish schools wcrc held outdoors in unfrequented piaccs.
113
dornestic reminder of home, is portrayed in the verse as a place of captivity. At the
sarne time, Heaney 's empathy with the rural world to which the cottage forms the
center is made a constant factor in his representation.
This feeling of endearment-a "quickening" of the spirit-is apparent in the
coastaI reverie of sonnet VII, where the speaker relishes various narnes of trawlers
and islands in a way recalling Walcott's "A Sea-Chantey." But he also hears the
"Sirens of the tundra" calling, "Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road. whale-road,"
vying with the idea of Wicklow as a "haven" (FW39).The mood tums sinister
again. In the following poem the speaker wonders: "How deep into the woodpile
sat the toad? / What welters through this dark hush on the crops?" (FW40).He
stammen out: T o m e to me quick, 1 am upstairs shaking." Glanmore's
"wildemess" haunts with rats in the ninth sonnet, staring through the kitchen
window. and "speared in the sweat and dust of threshing" (FW 41). His wife's
face is made strange as well, "a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass." The
ominous nature of the cottage is carried over into the poetic architecture of the
sonnets. as it goads something deep within Heaney's imagination. The final
sonnet marks a wish for departure in terms that reject the finally unsettling
cornforts of Glanmore: "1 dreamt w e slept in a moss in Donegal / O n turf banks
under blankets, with our faces / Exposed dl night in a wetting drizzle" (FW 42).
The influence of the cottage taints the ambiguous promise of escape the dream
offers. Heaney imagines the sleeping figures in deathl y repose: "Darkl y asperged
and censed, we were laid o u t / Like breathing effigies on a raised ground."
1 14
from the Buile Suibhne. the medieval Irish story of a king who goes mad during
1.. . I is topographical. His kingdom lay in what is now south County Antrim and
north Couniy Down, and for over thirty years 1 lived on the verges of that
thc pocm comcs aftcr "Maliing Strangc." whcrc an cncountcr with 3 strangcr cnds u p \cith
t h c spcakcr driving hirn ihrough "my o w n counu)'. adcpt 1 at didcct, rcciting my pridc 1 in dl thai 1 knc\v,
that bcgan [O makc suangc / at that samc rcciiation" (SI 33).
44 Si gni ficantl y.
115
territory, in sight of some of Sweeney's places and in earshot of others [...]."45 In
"hurnming full," at another juncture he cries: "My life is steady lamentation / that
the roof over my head has gone, / that 1 go in rags. starved and mad" (SA 23).
Pfeasure is taken in Glen Bolcain, my lair, / my earth and den" (SA 40). But the
"
burden of Sweeney's lot exists at odds with the footloose lightness he evinces by
turns in the poem. He only achieves rest in the thoughts of those like Moling who
make a final home for him: '"His memory flutters in my breast. / His sou1 r m s t s in
the tree of love. / His body sinks in its clay nest'" (SA 85). Heaney's translation
becomes his newest vault of remembrance. His voicing tropes Sweeney as a spirit
guide indelibly haunting his version of the poem.
Set in three parts, "The King of the Ditchbacks." makes Sweeney a furtive
116
gate" (SI56). Moving like a secret messenger he encrypts the landscape, opening
"a dark morse / d o n g the bank." This "crooked wounding // of silent,
cobwebbed / grass" changes the ground into a text he tracks his way through.
Sweeney, "a denless mover," acts as an archetype of the 'barefoot' poet: "He
lives in his feet / and ears, weather-eyed, / al1 pad and listening." In a sense, he
lives in his voice as well. In the last of the five quatrains Heaney's persona reveals
an obsession with the figure: "1 am haunted / by his stealthy rustling." In part II
the actual writing space forms a point of entry into Sweeney's alluring kingdom:
I was sure 1 knew him. The time I'd spent obsessively in that
upstain room bringing myself close to him: each entranced
hiatus as I chainsmoked and stared out the donner into the
grassy hillside 1 was laying myself open. (SI 57)
Entering the garden to follow Sweeney's calling, the Heaney acolyte's vision
becomes that of a bird's "at the heart of a thicket" in part III, which reverts to
spartan couplets. The speaker sees hirnself "rising io move in that dissimulation. //
top-knotted, masked in sheaves" (SI58). The architecture of the house is left
behind in this 'translation' as he imagines himself "a rich young man // leaving
everything he had / for a migrant solitude." It is a world entered through writing.
Heaney 's engagement with the figure continues in the "Sweeney
Redivivus" sequence. In ' T h e First Gloss" a new start is symbolized:
Take hold of the shaft of the pen.
Subscnbe to the first step taken
from a justified line
into the margin. (SI 97)
The disengagement from the "'justified line." carries echoes of the refusal of
religious pieties (Sweeney's crime). as well as signaling a sidestep from societal
entanglements. The "margin" signifies a transgression of bounds. and a flight into
another edgy space of writing; a threshold of re-interpretation and estrangement.
Heaney assumes, in hybrid fashion, the revived persona of the outsider. Each one
117
of the twenty poems is a gloss, "voiced for Sweeney," an imaginative explication
of a mode of k i n g (Si123). The writing metaphor works in with the idea of the
palimpsest. where different realities and tniths may CO-existinscribed upon one
another, just as Heaney works in together his conceptions of Ireland and certain
childhood mernories. In some poems he relates this layering to the land as a
rnedievai manuscript page with its own margins wherein he roams. T h e title piece,
"Sweeney Redivivus," views the changing prospect from a "steep-flanked
rnound" as a supplanting "language of forms." As the speaker notes: "The old
trees were nowhere, / the hedges thin as p e n w o r k (SI 98). He sees the "whole
enclosure lost / under hard paths and sharp-ridged houses." Architecture pierces
the rural skyline, threatening to dorninate the scene he faces.48
A textualization of landscape also i n f o m s the imagery of "In the Beech," as
rnasonry?" (SI 100). T h e figurative 'C' of a chimney is then raised up: "1
watched the red-brick chimney rear / its stamen course by course, / and the
steeplejacks up there at their antics." Signifying forms of measure. the letterstrucrures-which appear both "organic and contrived"-mark the encroachment
of an 'imperial standard' of (written) language.49 In the penultimate stanza, the
speaker feels the vibrations of advancing tanks expanding out from the tree's
"growth rings." Swooped upon by a plane. he winces at "their irnpenum
4s Hcancj, dludcs to thc d i t i o n of thc prospcct pocm hcrc. Originating in thc 1600s. thc prospcc pocm
is si Jcscripii\.c, yct discursive study or a givcn landscapc lrom a pirtiular vantagc point. It \sas rcfincd in
rhc ncst c c n l u v in pocms such as J m c s Thomson's The Semons. This topic \vil1 dso arisc in chiiptcr
thrcc. For funhcr background scc John Barrcll. n i e Idea of lmtrlscap and the Sense of Place 1730-lU0:Alr
Approc~c-llfo the Pourq of Johtr Clare ( C a m h d g c : Cambridge UP, 1972).
49 Cl. Mi&rmrner, XLIII, 'Tropic Zcmc." (iii) w k r e Walcoti rnakcs an ruialogy q u a t i n p A m c r i a n
i ntcrcsts bvith afchi tcctural trcnds in the Wcst Indics: "AbmSchot un billbaards. abo\.c Hmtcrfa dcl Mar. 1
u.hcrc\cr ~ h cEmpirc h;is raiscd thc standard of living / by blinding high riscs" (M 58).
118
"My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge. I My thick-tapped. softfledged, airy listening post."Jo The play of "bound" and "tree" serves to
reiterate the speaker's absolute identification with his beech and its enclosing
framework of criss-crossing branches. Yet Heaney also puns on "hidebound" to
convey how both secret concealment and a rigidly defensive turret of belief are
signified in the organic construct of the tree. Hide is the binding matenal of old
books and manuscripts as well. suggesting that the Sweeney persona's reluctant
flight marks an escape from the containing forces of a new, colonizing langage
with desipns on the landscape. These designs are fatefully aligned with history.
The rejection of historical "Units of measurernent," as 'The First Kingdom"
rungs of the air'' (SI 102-3).The bird-man relocates himself amongst "the people
of art" where he can "climb / at the top of [hisJbent." But Heaney remains wary
of such transcendence, his tone troubled in these assertions. In "The Cleric," the
persona wonders: "History that planted its standards / on his gables and spires /
linc.
in thc firsi
119
ties hirn to these home structures as well. in the fear that he abandoned his p s t .
Sweeney's urge to soar, flying up among the "people of art," places him
perilously near the Yeatsian figure of 'The Master," dwelling hidebound "in
hirnself / like a rook in an unroofed tower" (SI 1 10).The visit to his retreat has
been read as Heaney's rejection of the Yeats model of formal perfection, in the
fortified style of his tower.5 1 The "book of withholding" he clutches contains
'Just the old rules / we al1 had inscnbed on our slates." But the master figure's
book also identifies hirn with the codification of the landscape in architecturalized
'letten' that cm be traced as an underlying issue in the sequence:
Each character blocked on the parchment secure
Sweeney is more akin to a motive force in Heaney's persona. and he ends the
sequence in a place the symbolic opposite of the tower, 'migratingo through a
cave mouth, "down the soft-nubbed, / clay-floored passage [... 1 to the deepest
chamber" (SI 121). Gone to earth, h e contemplates his own "book of changes"
(rather than of "withholding"), which he envisages shaped in the "font of
exhaustion," the text where his voice finds its 'clay nest.'
5 1 Scc for instance, Mauhcws 173.
120
"Squarings," Heaney's long elegiac sequence in Seeing Things related to the
death of his parents, tropes the idea of the soul's "cold freedom" in connection
with architectural structures. Split into four "sub-sections9'-"Lightenings,"
"Settings," "Crossings," and "Squarings"-each comprises twelve poems that
"could be said to form a sort of constellation around the image of an unroofed
space" explains Heaney. The first, he continues:
imagines the sou1 k i n g called away on its joumey after death to undergo
the particular judgement. And the place where this othenvorldly encounter
happens is an unroofed wallstead and the sou1 appears at the door in the
figure of a shivering beggar. But the main thing about these poems as far
as I'm concemed is the free-ranging, sort of hit-and-run. lightsome
sensation that I had when 1 was writing thern.52
This "sensation" represents the qualities sought in Sweeney, now transferred
into the experience of composition. Contradictorily, these "free-ranging"
elements are confined within the limits of a given form: hvelve-liners each made
up of four three-line stanzas. But they are open-ended frameworks in tems of
meaning, where once more the spatial acts as a "door into the dark" of memory
and into vanous other temporal abstractions in the movement of the sequence.
The fint poem begins with Heaney sketching out the derelict house within
desolation is also one of imminent renewal: "And it is not particular at all, / Just
old tmth dawning: there is no next-lime-round. / Unroofed scope. Knowledge'2 Scamus Hcancy, trmscript fmrn Siepping Siortes (Pcnpuin Audiobooks, 1%).
121
freshening w ind" (ST 55). Like the tundra, a ground-zero of awareness is
represented, a coming into one's own. The imaginary architecture is figured as
another type of 'birthplace' for the soul, its lack of shelter a metaphor for an
ultimate clarity of perspective.
Poem ii begins with gentle imperatives addressed to the beggar-sou1 to make
this judgement place a (temporary) home: "Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in. /
Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold, / A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a
grate" (ST 56). It is also a "lightsome" invocation to the spirit of poem making, a
trope for the process by which Heaney keeps the forma1 "constellation" moving
about the initial, ambiguous sense of unhoused desolation and latent "scope."
The Iines continue: '-Touch the cross-beam, drive iron in a wall, I Hang a line to
verify the plumb I From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast." The speaker
emphasizes rneasuring and spatial relationships that will result in the nght degree
of duritas in dwelling, architecturally attuning the poern. A Vitruvian principle of
organic unity is asserted.53 Every part fits and is vital to reflect a conception of
the whole as a harrnonious order: "Relocate the bedrock in the threshold. / Take
squarings from the recessed gable pane. / Make your study the unregarded
floor." T h e re-building of the house constitutes a pure impulse, making poetry the
spirit-level that balances k i n g in the final lines: "Sink every impulse like a M t .
Secure / The bastion of sensation. D o not waver I Into language. Do not waver in
i t ."The idea of making is equated across the "language o f forms" to rest in
poetic language itself where words are proportioned into well ordered designs.
The influence of Sweeney can still be seen in 'The Flight Path," from The
122
toward home through architectural analogies. Part three. written in tercets. has a
notebook quality as he outlines his feelings on the transatlantic commuting that
has thrown him into Iimbo in recent years. From the short "stand ofr' of time
spent in Ireland, the speaker confronts: 'The spacewdk of Manhattan. The reentry. // Then Caiifomia. Laid-back Tiburon." (SL 23) Glanmore cottage (which
the Heaneys eventually bought) is savored more positively for its grounding
In part four an old saying is made strange by repetition and context. Asked to
car-bomb a customs post at Pettigo, the nanator relays the operative's assurances:
"And I'd be home in three hours' time, as safe / As houses.. ." (SL 25). The
eilipsis hints at his uneasiness with the analogy employed. Six lines later a new
stanza thrusts up the image of Long Kesh prison. and Ciaran Nugent's "dirty
123
phrase "safe as houses" hangs in the air, given an ironic twist. The question
where 1 have been living / And where 1 left. 1.. .J a distance still to go." But if
home remains unfixed here. a final poem reflects how a certain architectural image
has retained for Heaney a power of divination located in Irish soil.
65). The reader-listener is carried into the old home temtory through this memory.
Remembering her piano-playing, Heaney relates how the notes rose to the ear,
"like hoisted water 1 Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead." [n the second
sonnet, a defamiiarization takes place as the neighbor comes to stand for a 'well'
henelf, sunk deep into the place "where the singing comes from." He describes
her as "like a silver vein in heavy clay. / Night water glittering in the Iight of day.
/ But also just our neighbor, Rosie Keenan." Blindness is figured in terms of
insight: "her eyes were full 1 Of open darkness and a watery shine." Signifying
an amplialos in principle, she represents art's transfomative energies, and a
regenerative life force3 Heaney's reading, taken frorn the 'wellhead' of his own
art, echoes "Personal Helicon," referred to above: "Whcn I read / A poem with
Keenan's well in it, she said, / '1 can see the sky at the boflom of it nowW''(SL
66). The blind musician sees the sky's reflection in the well of the poem, while
- -
55 Cf. %hc Tmmc Road-: "O chariotcers. abovc your dormant guns. 1 It stands hcre S U I ~r. m d s vibrant as
you p a s . 1 The invisible. untoppicd omphaios" (1;7V 15).
124
Heaney sees in her eyes a well from which he draws "At the Wellhead." In his
poetic architecture the well is not only "in" the structure, but mimeticaily
suggested by the way the twin sonnets invoke an "intimate" and cranial
acoustic space, "far-voiced" by Heaney .
The pensive undenones sumunding the well in "Persona1 Helicon," are
simply not present in the "open darkness" Keenan's well represents here. As "At
125
connection."56 In his poetry architecture aMects consciousness in a way acting in
metaphoncal symbiosis with the landscape, offenng him a door into the collective
memory and to a buried or 'submerged' history.57 The island world becomes the
domain to which he is compelled to retum, and where his handling of poetic forrn
takes its more improvised, absact lync quality from in comparison to Heaney 'S.
In the opening poem of In a Green Ni@. "Prelude," the speaker States that
his life "must not be made public" until he has "learnt to suffer / in accurate
iambics" (IGN 1 1). Already poetry as a space of ambivalent retreat and solitude is
supgested, a way into the free fall of the imagination. Yet the self-consciousness
of this manifesto extends throughout Walcott's wnting, as a trope of
estrangement: the p e t separated from home, his mind detached from the forms it
both responds to and creates. In "As John to Patmos." the clairn is made: "This
island is heaven-away from the dustblown blood of cities" (IGN 12). While the
assertion appears heardelt as the persona adds: "So I shall voyage no more from
home; may 1 speak here," the beauty of "home" becomes an enclosing force that
has "surrounded I Its black children." Though it has also "freed them of
homeless ditties" there is an ambivalent feeling of removal on the speaker's part.
He wills the sentiment to include himself, yet is in secret rebellion against such
curtailment. Walcott dives for a deeper home beyond the 'village mentality,' just
as Heaney digs, voyaging into the inner recesses of self and community in the
s6 Styron 43.
5' Cf. his rcmuk: "Histov, in thc archipciago, is subucd. submluinc." Wdcott, "Whcrc I Li1.c" 30.
126
psyche to invent a radically new form of home out of the destruction:
After that hot gospeller had levelled d l but the churchcd sky,
1 wrote the tale by tdlow of a city 's death by fire;
Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, 1
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
Al1 day 1 waiked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and al1 the clouds were bales
T o m open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ wdked, 1 asked why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, ieaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
T o a boy who walked al1 day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love 1 thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire. (IGN 14)
Ironically, the "hot gospeller" suggests a Satan presiding over this "wooden"
world's epic ruin. The speaker's waiking "abroad" implies a heretical
absconding from his place.58 Resisting the desire to wax eloquent in "tears" over
the city's razing, an anti-architectural impulse can be discerned, as he blesses the
fire for the new world it shows him in nature's "green breath."
In an early article Walcott writes of how his Methodist upbringing made him
an outsider in predorninantly Catholic St. Lucia: "estranged not only from
another God, but from the common life of the island."59 He was tempted to "find
in the actual hell of the great fire, a certain exultation, since it had destroyed that
other life." The "wooden" element is reiterated in his architectural reminiscences:
The air above the ruins, for months after, seerned to ripple like a
washboard. There was a powerful sense of the unreal, the absurd. It was
long after the shock of that destruction that the shapes of houses vibrated
in memory and could be, in our imagination, placed rigidly into their
foundations. This was a plain of blackened walls, ridiculous arches of
doonvays, of steps that marched in air. [..- 1 The fire had humiliated the
smug, repetitive lives of these Civil Servants, merchants and Creole
professional men who had lived in rarnbling wooden houses with
verandahs and mansards, attics for mongoloids, alcoholic uncles and halfracked, ageing aunts, that rigidly constructed, French-colonial life of the
petit-ponche and the evening stroll. Down to the wharf to look at the
-
58 Wdcoti
lcft St. Lucia to study in Jamaica supportcd by funding crcatcd in ihc firc's wrikc.
59 Dcrck Wdco~t,"Lraving School.- London Magazine 5.6 ( 1%5). Rpt. in H m n c r . cd. 27.
127
island schooners and back, always d o n g the same streets. Al1 that had
disappeared in smoke.
"Wooden" becomes a metaphor for the "rigidly constructed" way of life he
associates with French colonialism and a "smug" middle class. Walcott encodes
many of these resonant architectural 'vibrations' in memory. in his poern's form,
Walcon has g e n e d l y experimented Iittle with the sonnet since "Tales from the
Islands," the form possibly carrying too much histoncal weight in his mind: a
"classic bulk" at odds with the fluent stanzaic architecture he seeks.61
Frequently throughout his poetry Walcoa tropes the cleared ground
represented in "A City's Death by Fire," as an ambiguous site of potential
growth, a 'nothing' formed in response to V. S. Naipaul's comment that "nothing
Cr. his commcni: "1 ihink thc proportions of citics. and ccrtain hisioncal pc& of prcat litcnturc. or
painting. for cxarnplc. dl havc si ncighborlincss. a familiarity. cvcn a provincialit~,to ihcrn." Styron 41.
6 1 Esccpiions includc 'Thc Polish Ridcr." and "Homagc ro Edward Thornris."Thc phnsc "classic bulk"
cornes from this Iast pocm (scc chaptcr thrcc).
128
was ever made
paradigm for cultural renewd that often finds expression in architectural imagery:
"Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be
built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles;
that being poor, we dready had the theatre of our lives33 Fire imagery is
invoked in relation to the founding of a city devoted to art, a Walcott ideal:
The "vision" remains unbuilt, in these words wrtten before he embraced Port of
Spain as the ideal West Indian city . But the iconoclastie energies exposed in "A
City's Death by Fire" continue to ignite the "city in the mind" here in reference
to the theater group Walcott was involved with in the early 1970s. 'Nothing-
Crirni\d. calypso. and thc Carnitxi costume as c x m p l c s of forrns which arc "original and ~cmporaxlyas
inimiublc as \\.ha[ thcy first attcmpwd to copy. Thcy wcrc made from nothing, in thcir rcsulting forms it is
hard to point io mcrc imiiatiom- Dcrck Walcott, "Thc Caribbcan: Culturc o r M i m i c ~ ? "Jo~trrralof
Itrfrrrrrrw~rntt
Sf~~diesntrd
CVorld Aflairs 16.1 (Fcb. 1974): -9. Naipaul \\.ri tcs: "Histoq is built around
achic\.cmcnt and crcation; and nolhing \vas creaicd in the Wcst Indics." V. S. Naipaul, Tite Middle I'arsage:
Irrrprussiotu 01Fivu Sacides-llritish. I;ruric/i alid Dutclr-in r k West Indies arid Sorttli &rwricn
(Harmondswonh: Pcngui n. 1%9) 29.
6 3 Walcott, 'Tsvilipht" 464 Walcott, 'T\vilightn 4-5.
65 A play u p m Saint Lucia's Icgen<lrin. blindness. Cf. CJmeros. and thc lines: "1 felt an claiion // opcning
and closing thc \aives of mx panclled heart 1 likc a book o r a buiicrily. T h c d p i n g roofs 1 glittcrcd with an
intcrior light likc Lucia's." Dcrck Walott, Otneros (London: Fabcr, 1990)249.
129
architecture whose 1 Sabbath logic we can take o r refuse." The speaker implies
that it is a matter of free will whether one stays o r leaves, yet in that mention lies a
reminder of the artist's divided loyaities. This factor now l w m s , and "leaves to
the single sou1 its own decision / After landscapes, palms, cathedrals o r the hermitthrush." Still, the sensuous picture is undermined by prior images of "drought,"
and the "heart's desolation" in the third stanza
Simmons. Walcott's early mentor, envisaged "rot[ting) under the strict, grey
industry / Of cities of fog" in England, that desolation eventually led, in an
unforeseen way, to his suicide upon retuming t o St. Lucia.
whole country' (AL 135). But countering this idealized picture of St. Lucia as
home is the opening of the next chapter:
Why ?
You want to know why?
Go down to the shacks then,
Iike shattered staves
bound in old wire
at the hour when
the sun's wrist bleeds
in the basin of the sea,
and you will sense it (AL 136)
rcmcmbmcc of the "unroofcd scopc" thc paintcrs had: "WC wcrc blcst with a virginal. unpaintcd
ivorld 1 with Adam's ta& of giving things thcir narncs, / wlth thc smooth whitc ivalIs of'clouds and
villngcs [...] nothing so old 1 that it could not bc invcntcd" (AL 152).
130
Despair is always ready to build in the 'nothing' of creativity as well, as the
speaker tries to justify Simrnons's death t o himself. Where before he lightly
reminded the painter of his "gift wasting before the season," and helps to
persuade him to come back to the island, he now admits that there are "spaces
wider than conscience" (AL 138).Architecture expresses two extremes in
Walcott's outlook, from the lyrical metaphor of the cathedra1 to the fragmented
vemacular of the shacks, acting as a powerful means of altering tone.
The selfless identification of Simmons with the island and its people leads into
alienation. a paradox Walcott leams ro appreciate. In "Return to D'Ennery,
Rain," the speaker's isolation resonates o n the level of fonn, marking a figurative
13 1
ambivalent feelings continues through architectural images, opening up memory.
Heart and heaven are further linked in a metaphorical shift, as a sense of lost
faith is confided. "Heaven remains," the speaker realizes, "Where it is, in the
hearts of these people, / In the womb of their church, though the rain's / Shroud is
drawn across its steeple." The space of the "womb" is given a negative
colouring in this passage by the image of a "Shroud," making it more evocative
of a crypt than of celestial heartland. The allusion implies a slaver's hold, wi th the
rain's ropes draping the steeple as if supporting a mast. Relatedly, the persona's
self-recriminations center on a "ribbed wreck, abandoned since [. ..) youth, /
Washed over by the sour waves of greed." A foundering on questions of faith,
motivation, and the historical trauma of the Middle Passage occun.
In the final stanza, Walcott continues to superimpose other spaces and times
upon one another through metaphor. "The white rain draws its net along the
coast." a ghostly reminder of a slave-trader's pillage along a shoreline at once
African and West Indian. The haunting of the speaker continues through the
invocation of an intemalized architecture: "Yet in you [the min) still seeps,
blurring each b o a t / Your craft has made, obscuring words and features." The
site is intellectualized in form: "Nor have you changed from al1 of the known
ways / To leave the mind's dark cave, the most / Accursed of God's self-pitying
creatures." Rain cornes to symbolize the "sad freedom" of the scribe's lot, locked
within the mind, free to wander only through imagination. Still, "Return to
D'Ennery, Rain" emerges as an exercise in humility, Walcott's isolation undercut
by the sense that in the rest of the poem he speaks for a historical consensus of
West Indians, whose "craft" originally carried them over in the Middle Passage.
From prison and hospital through the "gutter of the mind" to womb, church,
wreck and cave, the poem narrates a transition in material and imaginary
structures of perception. The min points to an important factor in the West Indian
132
world-view with regard to architecture. The most elaborate designs are subject to
the whim of the elernents, as the epigraph to "A Careful Passion," from a
Jamaican Song relates: "Hosanna, 1 build me house, Lawd. I De rain corne wash it
'w
In "Allegre" the speaker imagines the "sunward sides of the shacks 1 Gilded,
as though this was Italy." and celebrates upheaval as the Tint stage in a fresh
design for living. Trees are transformed into canoes with a chaotic fervour:
Men are sawing with the wind on those ridges.
Trees arching, carnpeche, gomrniers, canoe-wwd,
The sawn trunks trundled down hillsides
To crash to the edge of the sea.
No temples. yet the fruits of intelligence,
No roots, yet the flowers of identity,
No cities, but white seas in sunlight,
Laughter and doves, like young Italy. ( E N58)
Proving themselves equal to the humcane's reshaping skills in Walcon's eyes,
133
"Italy" in the symbolic shape of their vessels. The ability to roam free-ranged is
pnvileged over the trappings of civilization, and offered as an alternative
structure of consciousness. However, Waicon qualifies this vision in the final
stanza, complicating any sense that 'heaven' can so easily be found. "Yet to find
the true self is still arduous," the reader-listener is reminded, "And for us,
especially, the elation can be useless and empty 1 As this pale, blue ewer of the
sky, 1 Loveliest in drought" (IGN 59).A rnelancholic strain tempers his idealism.
iconoclastie severing of ries with history for a spirit of continual rernaking, then
"Roots" deploys the architecturai ruins of Vigie as reminders of "sorrow"
housed in memory:
The sea still beats against the ageing wall,
And the stone turrets filled with shaken leaves
M e n the wind bnngs the harbour rain in sheaves,
The yellow fort looks from the historic hill.
(As it were Poussin, or fragment from Bellini)
Its racial quarrels blown like smoke to sea.
From al1 that sorrow, beauty is our gain. (IGN 60-6 1)
In this description the ruins shade into flowers that secretly inform identity. an
i rnpression already implicit in the second stanza: "May this rnake [ ...1 a
'flowering of islands', / The hard coral light which breaks on the Coast, near 1
Vieuxfort, as lucent as verse should be written" (IGN60).Yet for every poem like
this, swinging toward a benign acceptance of architecture as part of the organic
unity of St. Lucia, there is another reversing the move. For exarnple, the speaker
in "The Banyan Tree, OId Year's Night" observes bleakiy: "The square was this
town's centre, but its spokes I Burn like a petered pinwheel of dead streets, 1
Tuming in mind f ...] children punished in their window gaols" (IGN 7 1).
Estrangement is seen as a paradoxicai state of grace on the margins of "this
town's rotted edges" as the persona declares: "1 thank 1 What wind compeiled
134
m y flight, whatever rages // Urged my impossible exile" (IGN 72). A parallel space
to home in the guise of the "deserted mind" is opened up, always in danger of
being "swept of truths as by a broom." Rain falls in this space as well, but it is
"Blank," a source of ongoing "melancholy [ ...) Dumb as the ancient lndian tree
that forces / Its grieving arms to keep the homeless wind." The mind acts as a
locus of architecturally imagined space, wherein a n "impossible exile" can be
reshaped and projected into creativity.
Walcoa expresses this principle in "Origins," a seven part poetic creation
myth. Language is envisaged flowing like lava out of mythopoeic sources into a
'new world' confluence of writing. But the mind, initially intent on "pierc[ingj
sprawl of Walcott's poetic form here. His shifts in line-length and register help to
impart an oceanic 'surge' to his design.71 Acting as Walcon's prime mover, the
"mind enspheres al1 circumstance," as "In a Green Night" has it. a factor that
emerges in his use of the castaway archetype ( f G N73).
The castaway's ambiguous fate is to be marooned on an island where
'nothing' holds sway. "If 1 Iisten 1 can hear the polyp build, / The silence
thwanged by two waves of the sea." the persona in "The Castaway" notes
distractedly.72 This is followed by a more desperate version of the events in
"Origins," as a cathartic upheaval in consciousness transpires: "Godlike,
7 1 T h c cpigraph. from the French-Crin bbcan poct. Aime Csaire, rcads: "narrow path of flre sirrge in rfie
hlrrr of f~blrs.""Origins"5 1.
'2 Dcrc k Walcott, The Cast~rvt~v
nrrd Otlrer Poerns (Landon: Cape, 1965) 9,
135
annihilating godhead, art I And self, I abandon / Dead metaphors." He attempts to
strip the mind of illusion, of its faith in anything. The pmblematic relationship of
Walcott's art and the faith of the people is retumed to again in the three-part
"Crusoe's Island." A locus of the speaker's sensory imagination is signified in
the "chapel's cowbell" that opens part 1 (C 54). Its peels echo off "Red,
conugated-iron I Roofs," beneath a "blue. perfect sky, / Dome of Our hedonist
philosophy. [. ..] 1 labour at my art. / My father, God, is dead." In the fifth stanza
Crusoe's stronghold is outlined, in a move to the underlying literary template:
Upon this rock the bearded hennit built
His Eden:
Goats, corn crop, fort, parasol, garden,
Bible for Sabbath, al1 the joys
But one
Which sent hirn howling for a human voice. (C 55)
As with Yeats, in Heaney's reading, haunted finally by the solipsistic vision of his
tower, Crusoe's "perfected f o m " cannot bring hirn solace.73
In part II, the island becomes a refuge where the mind may find a natural
purity. the "cure / of quiet in the whelk's centre [. ..] To let a salt Sun scour / The
brain as harsh as coral." This evocation is broken by a further shift: "1 am borne
by the bel1 / Backward to boyhood" (C 56). But a numbed detachment defines
the speaker's slip into memory. "I have lost sight of hell, / Of heaven, of human
will" he asserts. The island tums into a site of penance, of "parched, delirious
sand" where the persona stands at his "life's noon," fai th in his ow n skill gone.
In the final part an invocation to a Promethean spirit of art as "profane and
pagan" is made: "may the mind / Catch fire till it cleaves / Its mould of clay at
73 This motif is rcpcated in "Crusoc's Journal." whcrc a hunger for human c o m p n y bcdc\.ils thc spcakcr
in10 \vritir?g: "For thc hcrmctic skill, that from carLh's clays 1 shapcs somcthing without usc, / and s c p t c
rrom itcclf, livcs somcwhcrc clsc. / sharing wiih cvcr). bcrich i a longing for thosc pulls that cloud thc c q s
1 n.ith rav. rnimctic crics, / ncvcr surrcndcrs wholly for it knows / it nccds anothcr's praisc / Iikc hoar. halfcrackcd Bcn Gunn, until it crics / a t lasf, 'O happy dcscrt!' / and I m s a p i n thc sclf-crcating pcacc 1 of
islands" ( G 28-29). The shsrptng or thc "languagc of a race" is cnvisagcd from thc 'nothing' of Crusoc's
journais. \sehich nous assurnc a "houschold usc" ( G 29).
136
last" (C 57). The mind is troped as a bel1 emerging from its firing. Walcott
reconciles this image with the actual chapel bell. "Friday's progeny, / The brood
of Crusoe's slave, / Black little girls" are envisaged leaving the chapel and
retuming from vespers. "[N]othing 1 can l e m , " he States, "Frorn art or loneliness
/ Can bless them as the bel1 's I Transfiguring tongue can bless."74 Despi te the
humble admission, Walcott continues to try for this ability to "bless" with his
voice, as the image of the mind's emergence as another sounding 'bell' suggests.
Set within a church, 'The Wedding of an Actress" finds Walcon again
refusing the cornforts of ritual. In fact, the speaker, describing himself as a "guest
in the Lord's house," proceeds to "seal [hisj sense in darkness" (C 30). Another
inner architecture of the rnind is troped: "In any church rny brain is a charred
metaphor for the troubled faith Walcott keeps with his home culture as artist.
A church reappears in "Laventille," from The Gulf. Walcott reads its form in
an ambiguous light that reflects the collective memory of the dwellen in a hilltop
suburb in Port of Spain. The epigraph is taken (almost directly) from "Moming"
by Blake: 'To find the Western Path / Through the Gates of Wrath," and these
lines relate to the redemptive vision the speaker struggles to articulate while
attending a christening (G 12). Walcott outlines a picture of the suburb as a living
7-4Cf. Waicott's commcnts: 'Thc race was lockcd in its conviction of salvauon likc ri frcc-masone. Thcrc
\\.as
morc cnvy than hatc towards it. and thc lovc that stubbornly cmcrgcd showcd likc wccds through the
mincd aislc of an abandoncd church, and onc workcd hard for ~ h a lovc,
t
against thcir lovc of pncst and
smtuc, aeainst thc pridc or thcir rcsignation." Walcott. 'Twilight" 15.
75 Cf. "Novcmbcr Sun" which describcs a tvnting place where thc spcakcr si&"masuring wintcr by this
No\,cmbcr sun's / diagonals shaliing thc window pane. / by my crouchtd shadow's / cmbr?+oon ihc
morning study-floor." But it is also a dcsolate spacc: 'This is a sort of 1 dcath ceIl / whcrc knowledgc of our
The
.room bccomcs a mctaphor for thc mind. rcsigncd to a 'rime-riddcn" tcmporal
fataliq is hidden" (G 33)
fatc ( G 26).
137
architectural entity in the semi-rhyming tercets that make up most of his stanzaic
structure: "It huddled there / steel tinkiing its blue painted metal air, / tempered in
violence, like Rio's favelas." He describes its "snaking, penlous streets whose
edges fell as / its episcopal turkey-bunards fall / from its miraculous hilltop //
shnne." Subdued allusions to a tropical tower of Babel appear, as the historical
dimension broadens:
we climbed where lank electric
lines and tension cables linked i ts raw brick
hovels like a complex feud,
where the inheritors of the middle passage stewed
five to a rmm, still clamped below their hatch,
breeding li ke felonies,
whose lives revolve round prison, graveyard. church.
Below bent breadfruit trees
in the flat, coloured city, class
escalated into structures still,
merchant. rniddleman, magistrate. knight To g o downhill
from here was to ascend. (G 12-13)
The rnemory of the Middle Passage still fiows in the blood of the descendants, but
is d s o remernbered in the way the inhabitants are forced to live. Lives "revolve
round" certain places, generating an image of a grim architectural constellation of
on a balcony / and watch the Sun pave its flat, golden path // across the roofs, the
aerials, cranes [. .. 1 crawling downward to the city.*'The epigraph is alluded to
here. but the spatial trajectory turns inward, to plumb memory. "Something
inside," he states, "is laid wide like a wound." An "open passage that has cleft
the brain," is imagined, "some deep, amnesiac blow. We left / somewhere a life we
138
never found. // customs and gods that are not bom again" (G 16).A slave-hold or
prison ce11 is metaphorically figured in the unconscious:
some crib, some grille of light
clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld
us from that world below us and beyond,
and in its swaddling cerements we're still bound.
This disturbing notion of k i n g restrained, not sheltered-"still bound" in its
"swaddling cerements9-recalls the winding sheet of rain on the church steeple in
"Return to D'Ennery." Walcott's allusion is multifaceted, taking in the
christening going on in the church, the nativity and the consolations of religion,
and the structure denoted by the hill-top suburb. The architecture of Laventille
rcin\.csi in and rcdescri bc." Qtd. ,Maya Jaggi, "Enjo>ing the Fmits of Li fc's BountyVuThe Guardiclti N'eukly
37 July 1 9 9 7 77.
139
Echoes of the opening of Langland's Piers Plowntan are apparent here as several
commentators have noted, including Heaney in "The Murmur of Malvern." Yet
Walcott seems to be implying that the wanderlust of Shabine is not new-a
product of a twentieth-century diaspora-but fits into a crucial legacy of displaced
craftsmen who have "no nation now but the imagination" (SAK 8).The 'selfexiled' Shabine sheds his hide like Long Will and Sweeney. Walcott might
concur with Heaney's caveat in Sweeney Astray to the extent that his seaman is
heavily self-invested: "insofar as Sweeney is also a figure of the artist, displaced,
guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance, it is possible to read the work as an
aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of
religious, political. and domestic obligation" (SA ii). Shabine is tom with
ambivalence regarding home, a place that has gradually become unrecognizable
Questions of dwelling haunt Shabine over the poem's eleven parts: "Where
is my rest place. Jesus? Where is rny harbor? / Where is the pillow 1 will not have
to pay for, / and the window 1 c m look from that frames my life?' (SAK 8). But
the seascape world is initially profoundly non-alienating, and is given an epic
dornesticity as a habitat in his eyes: "1 stood like a Stone and nothing else move 1
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize / and the nail holes of stars in the sky
"poison my sou1 / with their big house, big car. big-time bohbohl," he seethes,
"and 1. Shabine, saw 1 when these slums of empire was paradise." Walcott's
underlying dismay with the architectural direction of West Indian society can be
140
discemed. the rise of consumerism threatening to reduce "paradise" to a memory.
He opens a map of the Caribbean, and blesses "every town" (SAK 19).The
matter of home is recast, though not resolved: "1 have only one theme: II The
bowsprit. the arrow, the longing. the lunging heart- 1 the flight to a target whose
aim we'll never know." Turning upward to the star-rnap, he muses on earth as
"one / island in archipelagoes of stars" (SAK 20). The sea's space is transposed
into the canopy of unknown worlds it reflects as he sings "from the depths of the
141
sea." As in Heaney's ' T h e Fiight Path," however, the 'true' home remains an
ideal, deferred through a restless joumeying.
Walcott often writes from houses that balance between sea and l a n d 7 In
"Winding Up," he suggests such a temporary corning to rest. "1 live on the water,
/ alone," says the speaker, ''1 have circled every possibility 1 to corne to this" (SG
9 1). He refers to "a low house by grey water, / with windows always open / to
the stale sea." Poetry is a "Silrnt wife" with whom he lives "rock-like." Yet
Walcott's own (delayed) voyage out from St. Lucia plots a trajectory of different
encounters and locations, recorded in his books as an 'elsewhere.' In al1 these
passages, including the half-years he taught in Boston, St. Lucia has k e n
"circled" in the imagination:
I've never felt that 1 belong anywhere else but in St. Lucia. The
geographical and spiritual fixity is there. However, there's a reality here as
well. [...1 One is bound to feel the difference between these poor, dark,
very srnall houses, the people in the streets, and youaelf because you
always have the chance of taking a plane out. Basically you are a
fortunate traveller, a visitor; your luck is that you c m always leave.78
142
Walcott's traveling mode often appears less "fortunate," than an unsettled
a funereal hint about it, a place from which to descend into dreams. His image of
the octopus suggests the castaway motif again, in the positive displacement
In O~rrcros.
Chapter XXXIII, Book Four, set loosely in Boston, Walcott
develops a metaphor for an uncanny sense of dislocation from home. The speaker
states that "castaways make friends with the sea," that to live alone is to l e m to
survive:
But a house which is unblest
by familiar voices, startled by the clatter
of cutlery in a sink with absence for its guest,
as it drifts, its rooms intact, in doldnim summer,
is less a mystery than the Marie Ceieste. (O 171)
Emblematic of the fail ure he feels as a consequence of "abandonment in the war
of love," the unhomely quality also reflects Waicott's longing for Si. Lucia. An
estrangement from this "unbtest" structure that mimics home's form is felt. "1 had
nowhere to g o but home. Yet 1 was lost," the narrator states, hoping that "a
ghost / would rise from her chair" and help him unlock the door (O 172). But the
persona himself resembles a 'ghost,' haunting the rooms.
Section III of the chapter presents another view of the house. Walcott reads
143
syrnbolic meaning. both mundane and disturbing, into its structure, as his poetic
architecture gives form to a dark reverie. Four-beat couplets give the section a
formai compression that is both cloying and bitter, the lines trapped and turned in
on themselves in self-canceling rhymes. A n anaphoric refrain is kepi rigidly in
place for the first eight couplets. Walcon breaks the rough terza rima pattern of
The image of the "creak[yJWbody melding with the house is thrown into relief by
144
the "CableVision" reference, which threatens the 'theater' of the self proposed
by the "wooden earth and plaster heaven." At this point the narrator reasserts
dispensation. "1 d o not live in you, 1 bear l my house inside me, everywhere," he
asserts, "until your winters grow more kind / by the dancing firelight of mind" (O
174).The house is assimilated into this figure of the 'intemal' dwelling, its form
disarmingly embraced in the final verses:
House that lets in, at last, those fears
that are its guests, to sit on chairs
feasts on their human faces, and
takes pity simpl y by the hand
shows her her room, and feels the hum
of wood and brick becoming home.
Acceptance brings compassion, in a metaphoricd resolution. The difficulty in
renouncing o r reclaiming home is an aspect informing many of the intenvoven
stories in Onieros.but here Walcott implies that the concept itself is open to
transformation. By locating his 'house' on the inside, he makes his mind. rather
than architecture, the enclosing force dictating emotions.
The ocean continues to haunt Walcott in both this space and the actual
houses he moves through. In the long-lined self-portrait of poem 30 from The
Barrnh. he describes a man, not unlike Shabine, in his beach house: "The sea
should have settled him, but its noise is no help. / I am talking about a man whose
doors invite a sail / to cross a kitchen-sill at sunrise."79 The notion of the turtle~~
79 Dcrck W ~ C O LThe
L . B O ~ ?(Nm-Y a k : Famr. 1 9 3 7 ) 63.
145
shell house reappears as he imagines the ritual of waking to the new day:
whose wounds were sprinkled with salt but who tums over their horron
with each crinkling carapace. 1 am talking about small odysseys
that, with the rhythm of a galley, launch his waking house
in the thinning indigo hour.
Troping the way a page of paper is turned for another, the discarding of the
"carapace" also refers to night's passing. The "galley" reference may also play
on the notion of a galley proof. In launching his "waking house," Walcott
symbolizes both the house where he leaves Sigrid, the poem's dedicatee, in bed,
to go and make coffee, and the craft of his own writing.
The persona he creates still seeks his home through this craft. Describing him
as "dawn-drawn by the full moon's / magnet," Walcott portrays a force of
creative upheaval in the planet's influence:
She dnigs the tides and she hauls the heart by hawsers
stronger than any devotion, and she creates monsters
thzt have pulled god-settled heroes from their houses
and shawled wornen watching the fading of the stars.
These final lines merge the heart. as cmft. and the sea together in a union subject
to the moon's cycles. T o be "pulled" from "houses" is to be uprooted and set on
a path of searching here, and to be unroofed and extended through poetry. The
sleeping wornan is also equated metaphorically with the landfall of a beach: "a
freckled, forgiving back [... I its salt neck and damp hair." This "small" odyssey
will lead him back to her. Walcott figures her not simply as Penelope, but a
settled" in any one place, despite sharing a more reflective state of mind. He seeks
constantly to evoke an "irnaginary country" that will undo routine, taking
matters back to one of the first ideas: leaving home. His forms are in an almost
constant process of re-invention as wcll, though he settles his craft more f i m l y
146
into patterns in Midsurnmer. Onreros, and The Bounty. The forces of cultural
definition associated with architecture-the colonial designs whose destruction
Walcott celebrated in "A City's Death by Fire" for instance-continue to be
addressed in his poetry, especially in regard to language. In his eyes this is
ultimately a West Indian "language of foms" under attack from progress, "till a
silence settles on language made with our hands. 1 The silence of white hotels" (B
are made, and sites fonned that posit the imaginative spaces for potentia
Stc\.cns 2 10.
771eEthic-al Fwicfiori
147
those heirloorns temptingly left" (AL 77). In this metaphor, literature represents a
Great House transferred ont0 colonial West Indian ground. Implying a defiant
entry into the English canon on his part. an acknowledgement of the connection
between poetry and an architecture built on hierarchy and privilege can be
discemed, a tradition stretching back at least as far as Jonson's '70Penshurst."l
In this chapter, the encounters of Heaney and Walcott with estate houses (and
their ruins) act as startinp points for inquiries into their readings of other
architectural sites and structures that form 'centers' o n the landscape. 1 argue that
Heaney and Walcott attribute a hidden life to buildings and things alike rvith their
exarnined (DD9). Writing of the Irish painter T. P. Fianagan, he uses ternis equally
1 Thc classic study of this topos is Raymond Williams. Tlre Corrnrry und 1lw Ci- ( 1973; London:
Hogruth. 1985). Scc also The Corrrriry und tlw Ciy Revisited: E ~ ~ g l mand
d [he Poli~icsof C~dl~rre.
ISO1850, cd. Gcrald MacLcrui, Donna h d y , and Joscph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cmbridgc UP, 1999).
2 Williams 46.
148
149
150
poetry of Heaney and Walcott at times. In this chapter, darker sides of the
idealized (pastoral) notion of home continue to be exposed in their
representations. Heaney and Walcott share an affinity with marginalized figures
and forebean, reflected in the registers of poetic voice, and generally refuse to
exclude these presences. o r their traces, from any imaginative viewpoint they may
adopt. Yet, the 'inner life' they descri be in connection with architecture also
refiects a more accommodating vision of the tensions making up any notion of
home. As argued previously, the potentially elegiac site o r f o m is always the
place of a possible renewal.
* * *
Heaney states, "we al1 must l e m [...J ways of including within the house of
poetry life that has heretofore shivered in the gaunt towns and the superstitious
minds."s In paternalistic terms more reminiscent of Matthew Arnold than
Walcott's "house of literature." his metaphor implies that poetry functions as a
culturally-ordained authority. drawing the less fortunate within its civilizing walls.
right."*b While such an admission seems at odds with the poems of North. o r the
sense of estrangement, political and otherwise, registered in the cvorks discussed
in chapter two. if tallies with his stance in other ways. Lyric poetry can be an
escape into well-established modes of aesthetic response; a 'dwelling' in
language as an ordered, quietist matter, with long-standing rights on the ear.
M i l e Heaney's analogy depicis poetry as a grand fixture lying in repose on the
-.
Hcancy. " A Talc of Two Islands: Rcflcctions on ihc Irish L i k r q Rcvival." Irisll Stildies 1, cd.
P. J. Dm&. (London: Cambridge UP, 1980) 18.
6 Qtd. in ~Mar-y
Kinze. "Dcepcr Than Declarcci: On S m u s Hc;uicy." Sal~nagundi80 ( 1988):30.
5 Scamus
151
wish to honor the 'sacred spaces' of tradition, while contradictorily, that power is
queried elsewhere. This ambivalence emerges as a factor in the poem. According
to Corcoran, "A Peacock's Feather," still stands as one of the "most notable
pagan subtext. The metaphoric notion of 'wiping the slate clean' implies that the
christening erases a troubled past through the ritual. This history is associated
7 Scc. for csamplc. Jricquelinc Gcnct. cd. The Big Hoirse in Ireland= Realify and Repr~serrrariori(Dinglc,
Co. Kcrr): Brandon, 1 99 1) ;Scamus D w c , Celfic Revivak: Essays ir~Moderrr Irish fiterature f 880-1980
( London: Fdxr, 1985); Fintan Cullcn, Visual Politics: T k Representaion O/ Irelmd 1750-1930 (Cork:
Cork UP. 1997).
8 Corcciran. "A Slight Inflcction: Rcprcscnlritions of thc Big Housc." A/er Yeats (~~rdJovct..
55.
152
with the niece rnainly through the house, as the slate reference draws in the
symbolically related image of min on its roof. A wnting slate as well, Heaney's
figure of speech evokes a sense that the christening ceremony and the house rest
together on a palimpsest, a factor which becomes clearer as the poem progresses.
Recalling earlier p e t s who framed the landscape in various scenes, the
speaker surveys the "prospects" of Gloucestershire, lying "Wooded and misty"
to his eye. A shift between the house and another place held in memory occurs.
He remembers the Irish landscape as "other than this mellowness / Of topiary,
lawn and brick, / Possessed, untrespassed, walled, nostalgic." bringing a hint of
"To Penshurst" to bear in the descriptive use of contrast, but reversing the
terms.9 The "topiary" has its correlative in Heaney's decorous handling of the
form, with the right words in the right places dutifully paying homage to precise
making. When he refers to "this mellowness." he is in effect reflexively
addressing the mannered tone of his persona as well. The tempering of the tongue
is felt throughout not only the landscape. but the poetic form as well, as it frames
the house.
While Jonson lauds Penshurst for not falling prey to new architectural trends,
Heaney chooses to define the house against a mstic Irish facm reminiscent of
Mossbawn.10 Recalling the Middle English lync, "1 am of frelond," a strident
claim opens the next stanza: "1 corne from scraggy farm and moss, I Old
9 Cf. thc discussion of 'To Pcnshurst" by Williams whcrc hc notes i i s "proccdurc of definition by
ncgati\-CS."Williams 28.
Io A point rccalled by MacLcan, Landry. and Ward in relation io Jonson's pocm. Thcy notc ho\\ part of his
design \vas to "rcpudiatc thosc nouveau mansions" that had sprung up ncar the Sidney's "'ancicnt family
~ rhc City
cstatc." Gcrald MacLcan, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward, "Introduction: T h c C o u n and
Rcvisitcd: c. 1550-1850." MacLcrin. et al. eds. S. In Hcancy's "Englands of the Mind," Jonson's Penshurst
is tcrmcd a birthplacc of thc Engiish pastoral, 'Vic rnicrocosm of patronage and patcrndism" (P 176-T7).
SCCais0 Williams 37-34.
153
patchworks that the pitch and toss I Of history have left dishevelled."~1 The
famines lreland has endured are reflected in the choice of "scraggy" in these
lines that also anthropomorphize the farm and its sumunds. 12 A tension develops
between the graceful tone his persona fits to the house and the resentment felt
over the colonial history of other homes displaced by such designs on the land.
"Here." says the speaker, implying the poem's lyric form and that of the estate
house. "for your sake. 1 have levelled / My cart-track voice to garden tones. /
Cobbled the bog with Cotswold stones." Subjugated, at least o n the surface,
"voice" is paved over, troped as a judicious pathway in topographical
concordance with the "garden tones" required. Though "Ravelling strands of
families mesh.' the separation of imaginary home in lreland and Gloucestenhire
estate cannot be bridged. "We'll weave / An in-law maze" he says to the infant.
in an allusion to the traditional garden feature and the pattern of complex and
bewildering issues that will underlie their relationship. Heaney foresees "trust but
little intimacy" between them.
It emerges that the "billet-doux" of the poem. addressed to the niece, is
of values associated with Coole Park. Yet he proceeds to recall the historical
sacrifices that have gone into ensuring the house's longevity. bringing the past to
1 1 Anonymous.
Orrr Hwrdred Middle Etrglisll Lyics. al- Robcrt D. Sicvick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Mcmll.
1 983) 59. Cf. Y cals's "'1 am of Irc1and'- from his 1933 collction Tlw 1vi11di11g
Siair arrd Ollur IJoern.s.
W . B . Y cals, The Collecrud Pmrm of IV. B. Yeuls. cd. Richard J. Finncri. Re\..cd. (h'ctv York: Scnbncr.
1%)
267.
12
Cf. "At a Potriro Digging": "In a million \rickcr huts, / bcaks of h i n c snippcd at guts" (DN 19).
154
bear on the present. "So before 1 leave your ordered home," the speaker States in
the final stanza, "Let us pray. May tilth and loam, 1 Darkened with Celts' and
Saxons' blood, / Breastfeed your love of house and wood." The evocation of
both Celts and Saxons argues for an acceptance of the legacies left in place by
the leveling passage of time, reflected in the "levelled" intonations of voice. His
own "blood" is involved here as well, and inked in the poem left behind: "1 drop
this for you, as I pass, 1 Like the peacock's feather on the grass." Taking a feather
from the symbolic peacock of "Meditations in Time of Civil War," Heaney makes
an offering to the child and the tradition Coole Park and the house represent. Yet
he does so from a conflicted standpoint, aligning him more with the lyric persona
of Andrew Marvell in "Upon Appleton House." The "ordered home" of the
estate echoes the "more decent order" of that poem, a "green court" or
"
He con tri butes to a tradition that steeps his poem in further ambiguities. The use
of the same octosyllabic couplets Marvell uses in "Upon Appleton House" and
"The Garden." suggest that "A Peacock's Feather" has foundations more
reactionary than subversive. A concem with nature and civilization, the old and
the new (in relation to architecture) is present, as in Marvell's poem.1-i
1-3 Andrm. Man-cll. "Upon Applcton Housc." A d r e w Mnwell. cd.F d Kcrmodc and Kcith W d k c r
(Oxford and New. York: Oxford UP, 1990) 77.Robcn Marlrlcy commcnrs on thc unrcsoI\-ablc ironics of
Mandl's pocm 'That places Applcton Housc within thc conicntious histoq- of England's Civil Wars and
thc Rcliimation. 'HemenSCetrrer' rcmains a fiction attainablc only in and through p o c t c - o r i n and
through a political cconomy that both acknowlcdgcs and rcprmws thc fact that Lhcrc can bc n o naturc
untouchcd by dcsirc. surcity, and compctition." Robcrt M;uklcy, "'Gulfcs, Dcscrts. Prccipiccs, Stonc':
Mrincll's 'Upon Applcton Housc' and thc Contndictions of 'Naturc."' M a c h n . ct al. ch. 100.
14 Corcorm. "A Slight Inflcction" 56.
15 Cf. thc "complication of feeling bctwccn an old order anri a ncw" sccn in Man.cll*s pocm. Williams 58.
fi
155
delivered the year before The H a w Lanrern was published in 1987, which may
have prompted him to reassess this 1972 work. As discussed in chapter one, the
notion of Coole Park as a hortus conclusus is prominent. As with the estate
house in "A Peacock's Feather," it is seen as an insular domain: "This large
enclosed space [...) traversed by walks, artfully planted wi th trees and shnibs."lG
Heaney reads Coole Park in terms of a "language of forms," declaring, "this area
is not uniquely an Irish phenornenon. This garden is an image of the achieved life
figurative garden: "This other Eden. demi-paradise, I This fonress built by Nature
for herself [. ..j."l7 The sarne anaphonc 'carrying back' is felt in Heaney's use of
"this" to generate rhetorical effect. But unlike Shakespeare's, Heaney 's garden
is related to "civilisation," a re-making of Eden.
In much stricter fashion than "A Peacock's Feather," he ideaiizes Coole Park
aesthetics as a matter of moral improvement. This is a place where the house sits
well-proportioned, its dimensions defined by a naturalized (class) order. Code
reality were constantly afforded to the human inhabitants.'' The garden acts as an
archetypal form-giver in the dichotomy he portrays. Outside its bounds lies: "the
unfomed, the inchoate, the unspeakable, the unknown." and inside: "the
defined, the illuminated, the elect, the fully empowered human life." Yet an
overgeneralizing tendency in Heaney's discourse banishes wildness from the
garden in his conceptualization, to frame it in the fallen "thom-world of sweat
1
Hcmc)., "Macccnas"69.
156
and tears." The garden penists as a "social and architectural fonn," representing
a georgic virtue which unendingly exploits nature for profir."to Heaney does
something similar (wi th regard to historical grievances) in "A Peacock's Feather."
but in "From Maecenas to MacAlpine" largely refuses to engage the issues of
the negative impact of Great (or Big) House culture by invoking a fantasy of
Edenic revival. He quotes Marvell's '"The Garden" with its lines: "Society is al!
but rude / To this delicious solitude," relating them to the fate of Coole Park and
the loss of a sustaining "system of values and manners."z1 While the Big House
157
rnicrocosm in the address. Yet, "A Peacock's Feather" locates much of its power
precisely where "From Maecenas to MacAlpine" fails to convince. The notion
that the dichotomy of inside and outside "cannot hold" and that a shared
ground is always built on emerges in the poem, to quote Yeats.22 Any
"proclamation of a centre" is always haunted by underlying voices and
traditions. Any "ceremony of innocence," as Heaney calls the christening, like
the house and its grounds, depends on shed blood and bone for its foundations.
In his address Heaney looks to a symbol which will stay the tide of
architectural "anarchy" unleashed by the 'MacAlpine principle.' and finds the
garden, as much as the estate house. A concem with this archetypal f o m finds
early expression in "Poem," dedicated to his wife. Marie. Set in four squarely
rhym ing elegiac quatrains, the speaker acts as a prototype landscape archi tec t
bent on improving the land. But he is also just a child learning to be a gardener:
splash I Delightedly and dam the flowing drain," he rememben. "But always my
bastions of clay and mush I Would burst before the rising autumn rain." He tries
to make the garden assume permanence in the enclosing forrn he has shaped.
This Adamic enthusiasm to create f o m s is carried into the poem's present. It is
now the child of the memory whom he wishes to "perfect [... 1 Who diligently
ponen in rny brain." Having begun the lyric with courtly deferencc to his
The "al1 corners" who penetrate the area are conflated with the plantation's
original inhabitants, as different temporal ities are confused by Heaney. "They
must have been thankful," says the speaker, "For the hum of the traffic !If they
ventured in / Past the picnickers' belt." A reminder of twentieth-century reality
breaks into this darkly "charrned enclosure." The final lines confirm the wood as
a maze in a fairy-tale setting, that cames an enigmatic lesson in its history: "You
had to corne back," he States, to " l e m how to lose yourself, / To be pilot and
160
speaking of the West Indies. "socially, the Plantation is not the product of a
poli tics but the emanation of a fantasy."z4 With this final stanza, a similar
registering occurs. Heaney reads the w
closed off within the landscape-like the former Plantation at its peak-and
responsive to his allusive probings.
A poetic affinity with such enclosed areas is again apparent in a passage from
sounds. Heaney makes the idea of "source" coeval with the "idea of sound," as
the enveloping lines recreate the image of 'beds': "stone circles which are said to
be the remains of e d y medieval monastic cells," as he notes (Si122). An invisibly
(DN13).Historic land
25 Thc titlc cchocs Ycats's "Ancestnl Houscs." with its rcferencc to "famous portraits of our ancesiors."
Ycats 301.
161
in a "servile shape" by the pose (to quote "Ancestral Houses"), the relative's
the "drearny," funereal effect with his study of the boat's wake. Heaney hints at
26 Ycals 200.
27 Thc attic is a fa\-oritc Hcancy writing spacc. For csamplc, in "A Snowshoc" from "Shclf Lifc" hc
dcscribcs ciimbing up *%tic stairs likc a somnambulist [... ] Thcn 1 sat thcrc weriting, irnagining in silcncc 1
sounds" (.SI 24).
28 Rcbccca J. Wcst, Eugenio Morilafu: Poet orr fhe Edgu (Cambridge, MA: 1 9 8 1). Qtd. in Eupcnio
Montalc. C~trrlefishiiones: 1920-1927, uans. WiIIiam A m s r n i t h (NcwYork: Norton, 1994) 176.
2 3 Dcnhm's "Crnpcr's Hill," which appcarcd in a final vcrsion in 166. nas onc of the first p r o s p t
p m s . In his case ihc vicu. iook in Windsor Casilc, Chcmcy Abbcy. and ihc Thamcs. For cightccnthc c n t u c background scc "PIcasing Prospccls." Williams 120- 136.
162
photographs.'50 Each one acts as a fragment, a disembodied prospect of the
original experience which he traces in the narrative.
T h e lethargic flow of the lines is once again disrupted by the awkward angle
of the woman's posture in another photograph: "Head to one side, / In her
sleeveless blouse, one bare shoulder high / And one arm loose." She is compared
to "'abird with a dropped wing / Surprised in cover." But the description of her
partner reveals a vulnerability as well: "Assailable, enamoured, full of vows, /
Young dauphin in the once-upon-a-time." This last reference to the unreal
the tone, as the speaker draws the reader-listener into the scene with him:
No more photographs, however, now
We are present there as the smell of grass
And suntan oil, standing like their sixth sense
Behind them at the entrance to the m u e ,
Heartbroken for no reason, willing them
To dare it to the centre they are lost for.. .
Hampton Court is presented as suddenly charged with life in the poem with this
insertion into the memory. An emblematic picture of the couple in the grounds
poised on the threshold of the "maze" is witnessed. Again, a center is alluded to,
li ke the wood in 'The Plantation." It marks a place they must become "lost" to
find, syrnbolically resting out of reach. Yet Heaney's use of "maze" also evokes
the Maze prison in Ireland, creating an unsettled undertone, and politically
Heaney echoes Eliot again in his simile. his tone turning more sinister.33
The nanator now emerges in a harshly critical guise, looking to cut the two
12.
164
aftermath. the dour proclamations on the dangling fate of the "two royal
favourites" ring with Heaney's feelings of accountability with regard to the "free
passage" he and his wife were granted through Ireland's 'Troubles' in the
seventies. His poem constructs a fonn of 'court' in which a retributive view of
justice is expounded. The liminal area opened up by the photographs,
"orninously figure[s J" the surveillance the protagonists move through under the
speaker's vengeful eye, signified finally by the trap-like form of the parenthetical
last lines. A grimly veiled articulation, these last sentiments admit of no quarter,
and the free-fioating drift of the poem's start is shut down in the axe-chop
closure of a sealed edict. The architectural metaphor of the 'court' relates directly
to Hampton Court Palace. With the change in tone that marks its appearance,
Heaney establishes the couple's sublimation under the oppressive 'structure of
feeling' that comes to dominate in the judging figure's rhetoric.
165
Catholics fared badly under Cromwell, who oversaw the dissolution of the
monasteries, and the firing of the crop leavings is made correlative to the razing of
this communal belief structure. Heaney tropes Cromwell's repressive rneasures in
the chapel's destruction, the "srnashed tow-coloured barley" image refemng to
the shatteting of the stained glass windows. Cromwell clears the windows of their
coloun and sumptuousness; they are "threshed clear," and the statues destroyed.
Seen as a "breaking s h e d of light," Will Brangwen's ghost implies the sense of
limbo the desecration initiates for the local culture.
Through the architectural connection, Heaney's ntualistic walking in the field
i-iding down the leavings sparks historical mernories of the "barbarous cnmson
bum" that gave rise to this spirit's unrest. He identifies with Brangwen. while a
certain symmetry of poetic justice ensures that his treading out of the Iines is
matched by the thought of Cromwell's eternal tnidge. consigned to a Dantesque
circle of Hell. By instilling a notion of the chapel's windows in the readerlistenefs imagination the poem leaves a trace, a revenant of form, from the
original structure. What was once the "proclamation of a [sacred] centre" is
rernembered in Heaney 's representation.
Moving to Heaney's treatrnent of objects, the same animation of forms, often
ancient in character, can be discerned. Water, soi1 and bog transfomi matenals the
way a poet works words. Before turning things up
"give and take." as "Relic of Memory'. has it, such constant and "drocvning
love" might "stun a stake // To stalagmite" (DD25).Shaping forces and hidden
designs are made analogous to memory's processes in this poem:
166
The ideal is replaced by an anti-pastoral vision cvhose bearings Heaney takes from
Spenser's and Sir John Gray's views of Ireland. Spenser's form is made out.
"encroached upon by // geniuses," who creep "'out of every corner / of the
woodes and glennes' / towards watercress and carrion" (WO 4-5). While
167
Spenser's shade dreams "sunlight," the local inhabitants crawl into view. The
extended metaphor of the bog oak being made into raften is politically charged,
as architecture is used to imply the fragmentation of Irish nationhood. These
"geniuses" haunt the frame of the structure, just as they trouble the speaker's
Another 'anatorny of death' is suggested by 'The Grauballe Man,"as
Heaney metaphorically crafts his poem out of a man's f o m . The "grain of his
wrists," is in fact, "like bog oak," the body reconfigured so that a spahalization
occurs over the twelve quatrains: "The cured wound / opens inwards to a dark 1
elderberry place" (N 28). "Who," asks the speaker, looking at the Grauballe
man's photograph, "will Say 'corpse' / to his vivid cast?" (N 29). Accessing a
threshold state with this door-like "wound," Heaney breaks down the binary
divide of birth and death, invoking "his rusted hair, I a mat unlikely 1 as a foetus's
[. .. ] bruised like a forceps baby." He fuses the organic and mechanicd in the idea
of rusting hair. Both alien and familiar, the speaker recounts how his "twisted
face'' now "lies 1 perfected" in memory, "down to the red hom / of his nails."
Like the man-child in '*Poem,"who wishes to be 'perfected,' this is a matter of
design, of the formai delineation of bounds. But the image possibly deceives-it
"liesm--and"actual weight" becornes the measure over the aesthetic perfections
of the visual register.
The Graubaile Man "lies" impressed in the wax of memory:
168
acuity on retributive balances. Aware of the way his own form 'grids' its subject.
Heaney draws attention to this dilemma of representation by ironically
undermining the 'perfections' of his lyric architecture with acknowledgrnents
that it too deceives.
1
At the start of "From the Land of the Unspoken" Heaney writes of having
"heard of a bar of platinum / kept by a logicai and talkative nation" (HL 18).It
serves as their "standard of measurement, 1 the throne room and the burial
chamber / of every calculation and prediction." On one level this refers to the
prototype kilogram kept near Paris. Yet Heaney is likely punning on "bar" here
to mean the genenc Irish public house as well; ominously. given the "burial
chamber" analogy. Wry acceptance marks the speaker's tone: "1 could feel at
home inside that metal core / slumbering at the very hub of systems." Heaney
architecturalizes the metal rod, metaphorically implying the public bar's centering
in Irish consciousness. In the earlier, six-part "Bone Dreams," another center on
the landscape is invoked, as he enters into an ancient meadhail-like "hub of
systerns" through the imagination.
With iBone Dreams," Hcaney delves into the figurative inner life of an
object. The white bone the speaker finds is 'conned' through the "rough, porous
/ language of touch" (N 1 9 ) 3 It makes an ichnograph, a "yellowing, ribbed /
3JThis recalls thc "'nubbcd trcasurc 1 your hands have known'" in "North" (N 11). Cf. Hcancy's cornmcnts
upon cncountcnng thc lis1 of Hugh O'Neill's possessions [rom his lifc in ihc Tullyhoguc hill fort d t c r thc
Battlc of Kin-sale: "WC havc cntcrcd thc r d m of thc muscum whcrc pastncss is conjurcd as WC mn thc tips
of our sl.mpathy and undcrsmnding ovcr thc braille or thc cxhibits." Hcancy. "Placc" 367.
169
impression in the grass- / a small ship-burial."35 Veneration for the bone's tactile
properties is as much for the transmutations Heaney gleans in the "language of
forms" it invokes, before it is transformed by his reading into an architectural
entity. The speaker bwind[sj"the bone piece in the "sling of mind," to
metaphorically "pitch it at England / and follow its drop / to strange fields." In
part II, he begns a series of shifts into other temporal dimensions, describing the
of the term within the recesses of the English language, a language which fills the
speaker's skull. Now architecturally figured around his tongue, within its
confines he pushes back "through dictions, / El izabethan canopies. / Norman
devices" (N 20). Similarly to "North." the tongue acts as a searching, tactile force
that hunts out the phrase's provenance.
The tongue doubles back on itself further. beyond the "erotic mayflowers / of
Provence." and past "the ivied latins / o f churchmen," to reach a source caught
in sense-sounds. As in Frost's notion of sounds living in the cave of the mouth,
an ideal form is invoked with the breakthrough "to the scop's / twang." The
%on / flash of consonants" are imagined "cleaving the line." Heaney's tongue
aiso has 'a bone in her teeth' hqre. as the tongue becomes the incisive instrument
of design. Each quatrain hones the momentum, confirming a dynamic wherein the
regenerative power sought through words is also felt in the build-up of tensions
provided by enjambment and finely gauged syllabic accentuation techniques.
35 A n ichnopnph. as Hamon notcs, i s ihc "rcprcscntation or rhc dcsign o f thc \.cstigcs of a building [. ..
idinos in Grcck mcaning \.cstige. o r thc imprint lefi by somcthing when placcd on thc ground." Hamon 59.
170
In the coffered
riches of grammar
and declensions
1 found ban-ltus,
its fire, benches,
in the roofspace.
There was a small crock
for the brain,
and a cauldrm
of generation
swung at the centre:
love-den, blood-holt.
dream-bower. (N 20-2 1)
One of the earliest instances of "bone-house" occurs in Beowulf. In his
chest. In "Bone Dreams," the trove is the word-hoard where "ban-hus" still
bums. defying its tomb-like incarceration. As with the narrator of '"To a Dutch
Potter in Ireland," the speaker reads it as a place of forma1 "generation." a forge
of bei ng, en tered like "a strongroom of vocabulary I Wherr words like urnx tlrat
hud corne tlrrough the jire / Stood in their bone-dty alcoves next a k i W (SL 2).
Made coeval with reproductive energies, the organically focused world ldged in
171
Throughout the poem the booe piece's phallic nature is hinted at. With the
image of the "'cauldron" swinging at the center of the 'house' the sexual is
merged with the linguistic through Heaney's architectural metaphors. The "bunhus" expands to becorne: "love-den, blood-holt, / drearn-bower" as the tongue's
directive energies infiltrate, creating other word-fonns. The speaker 'comes back'
"past / philology and kennings" to "re-enter rnemory" in part IV. Another
indeterminate. imaginary locus is irnplied, a place "where the bone's lair // is a
love-nest / in the gras." Suggesting ground flattened frorn a sexual union, this is
the site where the speaker and his lover appear to "ossify" into fixtures on the
land through their bodies. In part V there is a continued stress on these figures
who end up "cradling each other / between the lips / of an earthwork (N 21).
The trope of the woman as the land on which the persona lies, leads to imagined
architectural transformations:
As I estimate
for pleasure
her knuckles' paving,
the turning stiles
of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,
1 have begun to Pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder, drearning
of Maiden C a d e . (N 22)
172
Such considerations inform the cryptic rneaning of the geographic memory
discemed in the "big-boned" dead mole in part VI. as the speaker now 'winds'
this creaturely frarne by blowing the fur o n its head. Examining the "'little
points"' of the eyes. h e follows advice t o "'feel the shoulders"' (N 22-23). To
touch the mole's "smdl distant Pennines, / a pelt of grass a n d grain 1 running
south," is to touch another fragment of a lost "bone-house" akin to the white
bone in part 1. and the topographie lore remembered in the lover's storied body
(N 23). Exploring a further vestige of the hidden life of forms. the hands attempt
to divine the "nubbed treasure" of the mole and draw it within the ken.
As evident in "Bone Dreams," certain words become architecturalized
through Heaney's approach as a way of entering collective memory, located on
the landscape o r in language. In 'gToome" the tongue features once more as a
poetic instrument of linguistic inquiry. Punning o n a sirnilarity to 'tomb,' Heaney
pushes into the word "toome" through its sounding of an ancient Irish space:
173
II her hands, "holding henelf," are compared to "hands in an old barn / holding a
bag open." The Heaney persona re-enters the past of this barn in an architectural
reverie: "1 looked up under the thatch / at the dark rnouth and eye 1 of a birdgs
nest or a rat hole" (SI 50). Smelling the "rose on the wall, / mildew, an earthen
floor. / the warm depth of the eaves." the inquisitive. relaxed tone becomes
ominous in a further memory, or sinister premonition. "And then one night in the
yard." he discloses, "1 stood still under heavy min / wearing the bag like a caul."
3 7 In "Hcrculcs and Anracus" Hcancy writes of AnLacus, as an allcgorical figure for Ircland: "thc crzdlinp
dark. / thc ri\.cr-vcins, thc sccret gullics 1 of his strcngth. 1 thc hatching grounds // of mvc and souterrain. /
hc has bcqucathcd il dl 10 dcgists. Balor will dic 1 and Bynhnoih and Sitting Bull" (N 46).
3s Cf. 'To a Dutch Poticr in Ircluid," whcrc Bann cla. is turncd up f m "a littlc sucky holc 1-.- 1 Likc thc
carth's old ointment bos. sticky and cool" (SI- 2 ) . Heancy's formal tnbutc complcmcnts thc pottcr, Sonja
Lruidn,ccr's "languzigc of forms," achicving what hc imagines thcy might ha1.c donc as childrcn if World
War Tnci had not inlcn.cncd. It is a way of "touching tongucs" (SI, 3).Thc libcniion is enfoldcd
sym bol i c a l l y i n thc dynamic tension hc disccrns in hcr work. yct a solidanty is also wlcbmicd: "Hosrinnah
in clcan .md and kaolin 1 And. 'now that thc c c crop ~.ri\.csbcsidc thc ruins'. / In ash-pi&, oxidcs. shards
and chlorophylls."
174
A sense that the figure may be up for execution emerges.39 At once nourishment
reminder of the watchers' own status not as marginal figures "outside looking
in." but as dwellen caught up in a cultural unconscious that still maintains a
subliminal adherence to her dark logic. The 'caul' nightmare tnggered by the
uncanny space of the barn establishes this context. The "ring-fort eyes" invoke a
zone of defensive hoarding, hard set against the universe. yet Heaney refuses to
accept the blinkerings of this logic outright. Her "little slippy shoulden" are also
noticed by the "light-headed" observers: "She is hvig-boned, saddle-sexed. //
grown-up, grown ordinary." He reads her as "seeming to Say, I 'Yes. look at me
1.. . 1 but look at every other thing," and the rest of the sculptures that have
endured, fish. deer, *'figures kissing," are brought into relieL
Heaney connects the insidious aura of the Sheelagh na Gig with architecture
and cultural constraints through the barn and the ring-fort motif, though his
closure of the poem undermines the notion that one must 'know one's place.' In
poem xix of "Settings," from "Squarings," a system of reading, mnemonics, is
recalled that suggests the ambiguities inherent in such a concept:
3 9 Thc h g ' s usc as a womb-likc hoc4 r c d l s lincs from "Punishmcnt" rcfcmng io a bog viclirn's
"bctraying sisicrs, 1 uulcd in trtr" (N30).
the Norsc Goddcss figurc i n "Kinship" Lhc s p d c r "stcps thmugh ongins" 10 fac ( N 33). A niscd.
"clovcn d - l i m b , " his p x is transtiscd around this "ccntrc." which "holds / and sprcads" (N36).
4 )Cf.
cleared space in front was dizzying" the persona rememben. As in his encounters
wi t h the goddess figure, Heaney uses architecture to convey a disorientating
effect that leads into memory, in this case a "dream of fiying" above the "old cart
road" back in the 1940s. '*Terrible history and protected joys" surface in the
176
place. the Oresteia subtext, and the lrish political aspect.'
1 The
architectural
was like "using a rhymed couplet like a pneumatic drill, just trying to bite and
shudder in toward whatever was there. And after that first movement, sure
enough, the other bits came definitely and freely, from different angles and
reaches. In a way, that material had as much force and underlife for me as the bog
bodies.'-i2 The language here is resolutely spatial, implying a technique bent on
recovering what already exists in prima1 form. Each part is seen as proceeding
from a different angle to shape the disjunctive form of the poem itself.
"
year prison sentence waiting for a sign that Troy has fallen, he drifts into a
- --
- -
--
Thc pocm sas cornpletcd in thc tv&c of thc 1994 Irish Republiwn A m y ccascrire. Colc 136.
J2Colc 136, 137.
177
macabre revei-ie of a "killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong / It brought to
pass, still augured and endured (SL 29). He remembers dreams of "blood in
bright webs in a ford, / Of bodies raining down like tattered meat." Now "posted
and forgotten" by the Queen, the lwkout's despair and "honour-bound" fate is
felt in the tongue (on which al1 rely for news), a "dropped gangplank of a cattle
truck, / Trampled and rattled." The sentry finds solace not "out beyond / The city
and the border, on that line I Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had
178
future: "At Troy, at Athens, what 1 most clearly I see and nearly smell I is the frcsh
water." In the following verses the v i a sacra to and from the well at Athens is
evoked in oracular tones as the speaker recalls "that old lifeline leading up / and
down from the Acropolis" (SL 37). This "set of tirnber steps / slatted in between
the sheer cliff face 1 and a free-standing, covering spur of rock," deflects the focus
on finished forms and their sublimity (like the coming Parthenon) ont0 process
and means of access. Heaney describes a precariously free-moving structure.
made to resemble a DNA helix, the "zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself' in the
words of "Seeing Things" (ST 17). The "life-warp" of history is realigned.
Heaney tropes an insurgent 'underlife' at the h e m of the monolithic
structure:
secret staircase the defenders knew
and the invaders found, where what was to be
Greek met Greek,
180
elements to their forrns. Whether, as in "A Peacock's Feather," that center is the
house itself, the maze in "A Royal Prospect," o r an architectural object like the
Sheelagh na Gig, the encounter with certain structures and spaces prompts
Heaney to a deeper reading, and a figurative entry into memory. Through the
architectural he is able to evoke different temporalities, and deepen awareness of
how each imaginary siting o n a landscape is irnplicated in a histoncal continuum.
In many of Walcott's poems a similar tracing of the underlying meaning of
architectural structures and sites through memory can be perceived. A s with
Ireland, work has been done on the West Indies with regard to the history of the
Great House and the plantation system, calling attention to its literary and
architectural status+Set in St. Lucia, "Ruins of a Great House" explores the
interrelated issues clustering around this fallen center-piece of the colonial
enterpnse. As in Heaney's case, Walcott is aware of the tradition and conventions
surrounding the celebration of the estate house, especially on English soil. T h e
influence of such writen as Marvell and Jonson however, is matched by the
ironic relationship Walcott shares to colonial West Indian poets.
The ruined Great House represents the decay of a dream of empire. Though
Walcott mentions Raleigh, invoking his pastoral vision of a Guyanese dominion,
the problematic tradition of what Karen O'Brien calls the "imperial georgic"
mode also informs his p0ern.u The "fact of slavery in the Southem States and
43 Scc for instance Sylvia Wyntcr. "Novcl and Histor).. Ptot and Plantation." Sclvacoir 5 ( 197 1 ): 95- 102;
Joycc Jonas, Anan- in the Great Home: Ways of Rendirrg West lrrdian Ficrion (Ncw- York. CT:
Grccn\vad. 1990); Edward E. Crain, Hisioric Archifecfurvirr rhe Caribkan Islmids (Gaines-ille: U P of
Floridti. LW):Sumnnc SIcsin. Smfford Cliff, Jack Bcnhclot. Mminc Gaumd, and Danicl Ronmsiitroch,
Carihhean -le
(London: Thamcs. 1 986);Pamcla W. Gosncr. Carhhem Georgian: rhe Grem and Small
Horcse-s O/ the \ V . r 111die.r (Washington. DC: Thrcc Contincn~s,1982); Richard S. Dunn. S~ignrand Shves:
The Rixe of rhe Planfur CIuss in the English West Indies. 1624-1713 (NcH' York: Norton. 19'73).
Krrrcn O'Bricn, "lmpcriai Gcorgic, 1CidO- 1789," M-aLoui,ct al. c h . 160-179. Dcsccndcd (rom
Vlrgil. to Dqdcn and cighiccnth-ccntury p i s such as John Philips. Jamcs Thomson, John Dycr. and
Richard Japo, thc gcorgic m d c cclcbntcd " a ~ c u l i u r a land manufacturing Iabor and produciion." O'Bricn
44 Scc
166.
181
the work associated with the Great House and its plantationY Revened in
45 O'Bricn 173. S h c notcs: "Coionid g c o r g c . \vhich made a vinuc o r 1iicm-y dcnvaii\.cncss and o f
cconomic dcpcndcncc o n Brirain, hcld up an unaccepmbIc mirror imagc or thc mctropol ilan \-ision of
cmpirc." O'Brien 174. Othcr colonial W c s t Indian pocts \\ho strugglcd io rcconcilc gcorgic and pastoral
mrdcs includc Nahanicl Tuckcr and Gcorgc Hcriot.
46 O'Bricn 174. Though oihcrs. l i k c W t v a r d Rushton in his I77 IVrsr Ifrdk~nEclqqrtes implici tly
cri ticizcd s l a x x y by p m r a y i n g thc bmtality i t invd\.cd. Sec O'Bricn 175.
47 In Walcott's rcv. vcrsion, "sucakcdn is rcpiaccd tvith "shrickcrl." which rcinfwces an irnagc d a forcmn
shou Ling at sla\~c..
. Any scnsc of an idyl I is hauntcd by thc spcctrc of sla\-cr).. Dcrck Walcott, Collecred
I'oerr~~
I W8-19W ( N a \ York: Fanzir. 1994) 19.
182
images of slow degeneration. that making is now the sole preserve of the poet-
observer, as a dark anti-pastoral vision is framed in the eye and invades the
senses: "A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose I The leprosy of empire." The
emphasis on decay M i e s the etemal summer trope of the West Indies that earlier
poets were continually celebrating in their work.
Unlike Penshurst, this Great House was built to "envious show," reared with
many a "man's ruin (and] groan" as the cherubs' faces proflaim.48 In the next
passage the view from the ruins is described in lines that echo the demesne of
C o o k Park. a "spot whereon the founders lived and died [. ..J ancestral trees / Or
gardens rich in memory," as Yeats writes.49 Here the "marble head" is the house
i tself:
this skeleton is now grafted into the landscape itself. The "spade" reference puns
though, the river takes on a redemptive quality, troped as the heding movement
48 Bcn Jonson, 'To Pcnshurst." Tite Cornpiete Poe)ns. cd. Gcorgc Puftt (Ncw Hab-cn: Y a k UP. 1975) 95.
96.
43 "Ctwlc and Ballylcc, 193 1 ." Waicoti's river rccalls Ycats's strcarning '\vatcrs" as wcll. Y C ~ L244.
183
"craftsmen" in a way that alludes symbolically to the wnting of other poets. This
literary element is developed: "when a wind shook in the limes 1 heard / What
Kipling heard; the death of a great empire, the abuse I Of ignorance by Bible and
by sword." The Kipling and Bible references connect the "craftsmen" to the
the mind, / My eyes bumed from the ashen prose of Donne." Reading the ruins is
crossed with literary memory. The speaker dramatizes the Great House's faIl as a
didectical conflict within his own mind, centered on the question of how to come
is claimed.
Walcott reads the ruins as organicaily integrated into the istand's heritage,
thei r presence becoming part of the natural landscape's regenerative force. Using
the Great House's transmutation as a metaphor for an insurgent hybrid culture,
he deliberately undermines the elegiac aspect of his poem. The refusal to "dryly
grieve" the past in an unproductive way suggests lines from Ottieros regarding
St. Lucia: "For those to whom history is the presence // of ruins, there is a green
nothing" (O 192). As discussed in chapter two, that 'nothing' may represent
fecund possibility, in a creative arnnesia restructunng old habits of reading
architecture and texts with "stony regret." Again in Orneros. Walcott draws
attention to material reminders of the past and deliberately refuses to idealize or
extract economic history from the prospect evoked. ' T h e logwoods," observes
185
the narrator, were once:
The landscapes of village and former estate are embedded in one another, but also
wi t hin an cm bracing, 'epic mernory ' that has supeneded "history ." Over-
rnemory' above history's larnent: 'The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over
landscapes. and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the
ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts" ( A 7). Against their place in the
collective psyche the compact with the natural landscape is asserted. In
"Names," for example, an organic principle of architecture is suggested:
These palms are greater than Versailles,
"
Wdcou statcs: "If !ou arc o n land loolring tit mins.
commcmontc
Thcy more
commcmontc han litment
achicvcmcnt of man. . In a way thcy commcmotatc
That's ihc
thc ruins
you.
[.. ]
dccay.
clcgiac point. Thc sca is not clcgiac in that way. T h c s e . docs no1 havc an).thing o n it that is a mcmcnto o f
mm." "An Intcmicw it'ith Dcrck Walcott," intcn-icw with J. P. Whitc, Green Mowmirrs Review 4.1
thc
R ~ in
L Bacr. cd. 159.
5 1 Wal~uit,"Whcrc 1 Livc" 32.
( 1990).
evoke analogies with the fa11 of empires in the reference to toppled "columns."
History returns in such architectural metaphors, 'ghosting' the forms on the
landscape he represents in numerous poerns, and haunting memory.
The center represented by the Great House in Waicott's poetry will be
referred to again below. A closely related pair of sites act as a recurrent focalpoint for him as well. though. He reads vestiges of presence-an 'under1ife'-in
balconies and verandahs in several poems, and these locii become a way of
creatively engaging and figuratively entering deeper issues in memory. As
architectural features they tend to provide a mediating place from which poetic
perspective can be framed.52 In "Port of Spain" the balcony raiiing figures
symbolically for a city's streets: "1 can undentand / Borges's blind love of
Buenos Aires, / how a man feels the veins of a city swell in his hand" (FT62).
Throughout Walcon's verse many similar prospects tend to appear, recalling a
poet's tower in outlwk at times.
The speaker is not aiways directly on the structure, however. In "Chapter II /
'Qu'un sang impur.. ." from "Tales of the Islands," for instance, the balcony acts
as a stage he observes. Cosimo de Chrtien is seen "Peering from balconies for
his tragic twist" ( E N 26). A dramatic flourish also attaches to the three-part
"Castiliane," where the balcony ernblematically figures a style, and then a 'spirit':
187
188
Verandahs functioned as gathering places for colonial planters at the end of each
These overlapping images generate a mounting excitement, making the ghost step
like Hamlet's father from the verandah. The speaker describes laying to rest the
grandfather's remains: "Your mixed son gathered your charred blackened bones.
/ in a child's coffin // And buried them hirnself on a strange coast."j6 An analogy
5 5 Origidly pub. as "Vcranda" (C 38).1 quoic the most rcccnt vcrsion Crom thc Collecred PWIILS,
as the
spclling "Vcrmdah" is rnorc consistent with currcnt usagc. Walcoti, Collected Poerns 89.
56 Wdotf, 'Vcmdah." Co/lcc~ed
Poern 90. Subscqucnt rcfcrcnccs from ihis p g c .
189
to the process is found in the making of the poem. The burial of the "coffin"
cornbined in what follows, made to coincide with the infusion of the bone-timbers
into new lives as a "roof tree." They grow again, in Walcon's conception:
Sire,
why do 1 raise you up? Because
Your house has voices, your burnt house,
shrills with unguessed, lovely inheritors,
your genealogical roof tree, fallen, survives,
like seasoned timber through green, littie lives.
Through the grandfather's embIematic bones the house reverts to its source
material. Walcot? enten into a still deeper mode of visionary perception at this
point. The speaker "ripen[sl0' towards his grandfather's "twilight." "[SJinged in
that sea-crossing," he steams towards "that vaporous world, whose souls, // Like
pressured trees brought diamonds out of coals." At once a vision of the Middle
Passage, other migrational experiences are also drawn in. The strength of will
required to survive those testing joumeys is caught in the transfomative
properties accorded to the ship here. But the "diarnonds" change in the next
Iines to stars: ' T h e sparks pitched from your buming house are stars. / 1 am the
man rny father loved and was." In tracing the provenance of this bone-house
wood, Walcott alludes to the carbon origins of life, as the stars or sparks
metaphoncally stand for human beings as well. In a sense, the "burning house" is
conflated with a slave ship. Both are doorned progenitors of life, and with the
image of "sparks pitched" from the house, Walcott raises up and includes in his
structure those unfortunates tossed overboard from the slavers. Their memory
also bums in the pyre he envisages, and the unheard voices enter his own, with
those of his father and grandfather.
190
Walcott brings rnatters back to the initial imaginary house in his final lines:
1 climb the stair
and stretch a darkening hand to greet those friends
who share with you the fast inheritance
of earth, o u r shrine and pardoner,
In "The Train," Walcott wonders where his "randy white grandsire" came
from. pnor to quitting England for the West Indies (G 54). En route in the
"harrowed" English countryside, the speaker iaments, "1 cannot change places, /
1 am half-home," but a sense of shared identi ty emerges in connection with
191
Yet Walcon implies Thomas and his work resist such a classification. Jonson's
lines of praise from the end of "To Penshurst" are recalled in the "classic b u l k
cornparisons that would critically "proportion" Thomas's achievement. "Now.
Penshurst, they that will proponion thee," Jonson writes, "With other edifices.
when they see / Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, / May Say. their
lords have built, but thy lord dwells."58 Thomas 'dwells' in the essence of literary
memory the flowers incarnate, fused in natural repose-sgAs in "Verandah," a
192
Walcott locates him within as well, at the "hidden" heart of a Georgian retreat.61
In Sea Grupes the Great House again cornes under scrutiny through the
landscape it occupies in "Midsummer, England." Henley's "legendary
landscapes are alive, / palpable air; woods, c a d e s , manon, suns, / pressing their
postcards on you as you drive" (SG 75). In a reversal of the prospect idea the
speaker appears the center of attention. closed in on by the setting. The
"postcard' scenes dictate his gaze as that of a tourist. Adopting an apocalyptic,
Yeatsian tone. the persona interprets this as defensiveness, describing: "the fear
of darkness entering England's vein, / the noble monuments pissed on by rain, /
the imperial blood corrupted." As with "Ruins of a Great House," a restorative
note penists. Summer's greater design triumphs, trying through "love-nourishing
rain / to dissolve individual grief, / history and heart-break." The last stanza grows
ambiguous again, however, as the season takes dominion over the scene:
Rodigious summer whose black fruit includes.
past this and that great house,
between hills bracketing thunder,
a great cloud's shadow that grows close
as the past. a chi11 that intrudes
under the heat, under the centuries;
rooks swinging in the wind, under great boughs.
1ynched crows, on a green field. (SG 76)
Walcon redirects the colonial tropes of reading the West Indies against the
English landscape, portraying this countryside as haunted by its irnperial past.
The "black fruit," linked to the "great cloud's shadow" and the lynchings, recall
the underside of the colonial enterprise usually repressed in the poetic imaginary
of --impenal georgic." They signify in Wdcon's text the brutally reaiized traces.
fi 1
193
'To Penshurst32 Writing back to empire, Walcott tests the center he figures in
the idea of the Great House, considenng whether i t holds.
t
In "Jean Rhys," from The Forfurrate Tmveller. photographs, "faint [ ... ] mottied
wi th chemicals," are the frame of reference wherein the speaker observes the
white. their jungle tumed tea-brown" (FT45).A fin de sicle milieu is evoked, as
Walcott re-imagines the estate amongst the lime trees. The mill-wheel-another
vital "hub of systemsW-is described as the keeper of time itself: "the cernent
grindstone of the aftemoon / Nms slowly, sharpening her senses, / the bay below
is green as calalu. stewing Sargasse" (FT46).A syrnbolic reminder of the
economic stakes underlying the torpor of the scene, the wheel also acts as an
emblem for the quickening of Rhys's artistic sensibilities. Walcott again deploys
the trope in relation to the Great House, and to language and creativity in "The
in lhcsc lincs: "Onc moming thc Crinbbcan was cut up / by sc\.cn p n m c minisrcrs tvh
b u g h t thc s a i n bolts" (SAK 53).
observers:
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such subjects as
"Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye." (SAK 46)
Walcon intimates how landscape aesthetics, as form ulated in the eighteenth
century in a nurnber of authors, and in poetic works such as James Thomson's
The Seusons. affected the depiction of the West Indies. Here, however, the
process of projection found in Edward Long's Histon of Jun~uica,for instance,
becomes a means of defamiliarizhg his own topographie prospect of the
frame of reference for the speaker's description, a s the "shards" of empire emerge
as workerless mills. They mark Walcott's other main concem in the poem, the fate
of language:
T h e mountain water that fell white from the miIl wheel
sprinkling like petais from the star-apple trees,
and dl of the windmills and sugarmills moved by mules
o n the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat
in tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues
o f Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering
their source, Parish Trelawny, Parish St. David, Parish
St. Andrew, the names afflicting the pastures
An ideological dominance is asserted in the way these various mills organize time
in Walcott's conception: "Monday to Monday." A constant measuring out of
existence in labor terms is asserted, but their rhythms generate a rnnemonic effect,
training the land and language together in an insidious manner.
We are gradually led into the Great House through the insistent Pansh
naming as the indeterminate temporality of the scene is maintained:
And there were, like old wedding lace in an attic,
-
fi-$ Scc
Bohls. cspccidly 18589. Long's Hisrory ~ v a saccompanicd by various views of the Jarnakm
n e a r 3 s Following this line the picture alters, though. Through various details a
miniature doll's house plantation is revealed, things "diminished and "reduced"
IO
n o longer accord with memory. The vision is given a "lurid sheen with this
196
excluded from the frarnes of representation, "their mouths locked in the locked
jaw of a silent scream" (SAK 47). "[Ilnnocently excluded," the speaker acidly
notes, "the groom, the c a d e boy, the housemaid, the gardeners, 1 the tenants, the
good Negroes down in the village." This screarn marks an excess the Great
House's architecture cannot contain: "A screarn which would open the doors to
swing wildly / al1 night, that was bringing in heavier clouds, / more black smoke
than cloud." It turns into a "scorching wind of a scream," that begins to dry the
water mil1 "creaking to a stop 1 as it was about t o pronounce Parish Trelawny / ail
over, in the ancient pastoral voice." The screarn's transformation sees it take on a
diasporic power as the dark reverie of the Great House fades.
Yet the phrase "ancient pastoral" is sounded a third time, stressing the
ambivalent, warning edge in Walcott's association of Manley with the Great
House, in some ways a (potential) "reification'* of his character. in Williams's
terms. The Manley figure stares from the "Great House windows,' taking in the
changed prospect, faced with the "wind of a scream" continuing outside:
his hand could not dam that ceaseless torrent of dust
that carried the shacks of the poor, to their root-rock music,
down the gullies of Yallahs and August Town,
to lodge them on thoms of maca, with their rags
crucified by cactus, tins, old tires, cartons;
from the black Warieka Hills the sky glowed fierce as
the dials of a million radios,
a throbbing sunset that glowed like a grid
where the dread beat rose from the jukebox of Kingston. (SAK 48)
197
Transfigured in dust and music, the wind comes to resemble a "torrent" filling this
spatial matnx, yet the protagonist can think only of the pastorally-inflected
'language' of the Jamaican countryside, now ninning dry: "He saw the fountains
dried of quadrilles, the water-music / of the country dancers, the f i d d l e ~like fifes 1
put aside." There are no "vowels left 1 in the miIl wheel, the river. Rock stone.
Rock s t o n e 3 9 But Manley takes it upon himself to "heai / this malerial island,"
and the Great House where he dwells becomes the place from which Walcott
He hears the "drowned choirs under Palisadoes, 1 a hymn ascending to earth from
a heaven inverted / by water, a crab climbing the steeple." Walcott figures the
198
of the sea / inside a sea-cave." Moving toward recent times, the vision tums
prosaic: "the hotels went up, and the casinos and brothels, / and the empires of
tobacco, sugar, and bananas." Yet the architectural focusing of the imagery is
kept on the Great House, its frame providing context, its center anchoring the
drearn in Manley's mind.
The black woman who knocks at the "door of his drearn" saying: '"I'm the
Revolution. 1 am the darker, the older America"' returns uncannily from the
collective unconscious. But she is also simply a figure from childhood:
the housernaid and the cook,
the young grand' who polished the plaster figure
of Clio. Muse of history, in her seashell grotto
in the Great House parlour, Anadyomene washed
in the deep Atlantic heave of her housemaid's hymn. (SAK 55)
Through her, the house marks a wellspring into an alternative source of myth and
memory in the sea itself that M i e s its backwater status in other eyes: "What was
the Caribbean? A green pond mantling / behind the Great House columns of
Whitehail. / behind the Greek facades of Washington" (SAK 56). These locii seem
two sides of the same coin, emblematically struck by empire. Manley must
struggle against this world-weary attitude as a political leader. Yet, the visionary
capacities of the West Indies are stressed by Walcon through the allegorical guise
of the black woman, and the plumbing of the sea's imaginative depths. T h e Great
House is enjoined in this transformation, and as with the divining imagery ending
"Mycenae Lookout," a sense is evoked that submarine energies coeval with the
collective memory can be tapped. Near the end of the poem the Manley figure is
portrayed identifying with the excluded workers from the Great House, as he
feels his "jaw drop / again with the weight of that silent scream." Here Walcott
aligns Manley within that "scorching wind" the scream becomes. He no longer
stands outside, watching from the windows. but is incorporated in this metaphor
for the dynarnic resilience of Jamaican culture.
199
architecture. "Was evil brought to this place / with language?" asks the speaker,
"Did the sea worm bury that secret in clear sand, 1 in the coral cathedrals, the
submarine catacombs 1 where the jellyfish trails its purple, imperid fringe?" (M
35). These structures parody and threaten tu outlast achievements built on land,
70 Cf. Walcott's assertion: "In the subconscious thcrc is a black Atlantis buricd in a sca of sand. Thc
colonial is touphcr. Hc secs histo* for whai it is in thc world around him, an d m o s t incsprcssiblc
bandit?."
"Musc" 22.
200
creating a castled dynasty of forgotten, whimsical grandeur that undermines
imperial and neo-colonial logics of progress o r 'improvement. '
Walcott initially creates a mock empire of ease in "the corals' bone kingdom"
represented in Omeros. Achille undergoes a series of dream-vision submersions in
this Caribbean underworld: "Why was he down here. from their coral palaces, 1
pope-headed turtles asked him" (O 45). The sea's vault of history is idealized as a
treasure-chest, its "ransorn of centuries" counted by a "moon-blind Cyclops"
behind "mossy doors" as light paves the "ceiling with silver" (046).
At another
point Achille devolves into a "walking fish," and joumeys through a world of
"groves" and "vast meadows of coral" which tum out to be "huge cemeteries II
of bone" (O 142). The three centuries of aquatic joumeying on this epic quest
take him back in time to the African village of his forebears, whose idyllic premise
is on the brink of k i n g shattered by slavers.
20 1
to a "hybrid organism" escaping categorization: "From that corai and crystalline
origin, a simply decent 1 race broke from its various pasts" (O 297). The opulence
is ghosted by "motionless hordes," as the rhetoncal excess of the description
belies the "nothing" that is commemorated. "P]t had coral parthenons," he
continues, playfully evoking neo-classical parailels, "No needling steeple /
magnetized pilgrims, but it grew a good people." Though this is also a place of
the dead. an underworld, the accent on natural growth is constant; this city is not
buil t, but evolves, self-formed, inventing i tself out of nothing. Walcott offers a
vision of intertwined architectural and cultural binh here. coral fusing to f o m an
idealized center answenng to its own designs.
A retum to another ruined Great House as a site of cultural ongin takes place
in the fint poem of "A Santa Cruz Quartet" from The Bounh. The speaker's
imagining of the house becomes an act of reconstruction that goes back in
memory to colonial times and the way races "inevitably took root" in the valley
(B 7 1 ). He describes the estate: "In their regulated avenues the orchards of
grapefruit / hung easy and thick," noting how, "the rind of daylight ripened from
green to rose, / as you came down the coiled asphalt ridge with its snaking
turns." The speaker's perspective flows unobtrusively into the scene with this
approach, and he assumes a calmly meditative tone maintained over the twentyfive line stanza making up the poem. A feeling close to detachment marks the
persona's air: the argument with the self that informs "Ruins of a Great House" is
absent. A pastoral vision of a lost garden, the speaker finds the landscape already
aestheticized to the eye which absorbs the scene, a climate where "beauty is
ordinary," and the memories benign. Marvell's mower poems, and lines from
"The Bermudas" are alluded to: "the yellow globes in the leaves glowed like
Marvell's lanterns; 1 then shed roofs began, the lost estate, the scarred quarry. /
Imagine the scythes of harvesters on the old estate." No longer true "working
202
country," this plantation has once again become a "landscape" in Walcott's
reading.71 Observing in mm, the reader-listener is led into the smctuary of the
estate through his persona's continued invocations t o "imagine [. ..]" the
prospect.
The ironic orchestration o f vision Walcott adopts 'simplifies' his reading o f
the Great House and its grounds, thus according with a modified view of the past:
imagine a Great
House (not that great in scde, without a scrolled gate
o r a keeper's lodge, only a verandah with fretwork eaves,
rocking chairs o n the verandah) when the evening egret
left off tick-picking cows f o r the enclosing leaves,
and close the book then, with the natural rhythm
of its wings and Our simplified past.
The speaker's parenthetical qualifications frame the house on a humbler scale.
recalling the catalogue of negatives 'To Penshurst" begins with, and offsetting
any charge of ostentation. But this Great House ultimately merges with the
landscape, becoming a symbol of the buried unity between races. Al1 those w h o
"loved the valley" are summoned within the memory the poet invites. No longer
split by "bitter faction," as in "Ruins of a Great House," but "rooted in [the
valley 1 with a differentiated love," he discems "races as varied as the cocoa pods
in complexion, 1 the snow-speckled trunks enduring the affliction / of envy and
hatred, a blight that time would remove." Walcott celebrates the estate not in
terms of improvement, but through the fa11 back into a reconciled nature. The past
deeds and misdeeds of the former inhabitants sink "like the sorrow in the rich soil,
untii eventually / their history dimrned a n d vanished into fiction." A n 'underlife'
is divined where the Great House once stood, but a s in "Homage to Edward
Thomas." nature absorbs the essence of the dwellers in the receding 4bsorrow"o f
the earth and its resurgent forms.
Another poem from The Bounty evokes Yeats and the "serene domain" of an
71 Cf- Williams's commcnt: "A working countq is hardly cvcr a landscapc." Williams 120.
203
%ien" that descends equally from the fading plantation world, shom of some of
its ambivalence. This is Walcott's house on Cap Estate, mentioned in chapter one:
Awaking to gratitude in this generous Eden,
far from frenzy and violence in the discretion of distance,
my debt, in Yeats's phrase, to 'the bounty of Sweden'
that has built this house facing white comben that stands
for hot, rutted lanes far from the disease of power,
spreads like hat copper-beech tree whose mots are Ireland's,
with a foam-haired man pacing around a square tower
muttering to a grey lake stirred by settling swans,
in the flare of reputation; whose declining hour
is exultation and fury both at once. (B61)
The homage transforms the beach house to unselfconsciously take in the tower.
Yeats's monument to the poetic will to power. Here the speaker awakes to
"gratitude." rather than to the tenacious "nightmare of history," as out of place
as ruins here: 'There is no wood whose branches bear gules of amber / that
scream when they are broken, no balsam cure, / nothing beyond those waves 1
care to remernber." Walcott's form creates an immersive flow for the eye and ear,
as Yeats's example is decorously drawn into the poem's structure.
Walcott's celebration of the sea and the landscape around the house leads
him to drift into the imaginary Irish setting, drawn from his reading of Yeats:
Waves become analogous to poetic Iines, metamorphosing into swans. The beat
of the swans here is the "bell-kat" of the "clamorous wings" in Yeats's "The
Wild Swans at Coole," who clap out mortality's "natural metre" as well. Walcon
accepts the "bounty" that is the exultant architecture of his form here, but also
the house's form itself, the reward for his endeavours as maker.
204
If Heaney accepts his p t i c residence in the country house of "A Peacock's
Feather" with mixed feelings, Walcon treats his beach house as a rightful
inheritance. He fulfills the legacy relating to the nest-building of the swans that
Yeats voices as a querulous open-ended conclusion to his earlier poem:
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge o r pool
Delight men's eyes when 1 awake some day
T o find they have flown away.2
With the waves as his swans, Walcottsbeach house stands resolutely open to
the sea and the elements in this poem, though a sense of removal from the local
community penists. Yet a specific accord with literary tradition, the surrounds,
and with both memory and history appears to have been reached in his eyes.
outlook. In the above Bouny poem, he proclaims his own demesne without any
sense of guilt, confirming the sentiments expressed in the "Where 1 Live" article,
quoted in chapter one. A s in Heaney's view, certain architectural sites develop
over time into "sacred places to adorc" in his conception as well.73 Yet Walcott's
iconoclastie power of imaginative revision. revealed in the portrayals of history's
excluded 'undcrlife' in the earlier poems, remains undeniable. As in Heaney, we
find a concern with the vibrant presences discernible in built structures and
architectural objects. This allows him to evoke other temporalities within his
poetic confines. To quote from the title of Baugh's study of Anoflter Lve. a
process of "memory as vision" frequently results from Walcon's creative
-
7 2 ~ c a t s131-32.
205
regard to the handling of elegy, will be the central topic of the final chapter on
the poetry. Heaney and Walcott often allude to earlier poets who have worked in
the genre, echoing aspects of their texts. Thus the notions of literary memory and
homage are important as well. Once more, the controlled invocation of the spatial
creates the necessary circumstances for the imaginative investigation of maners
relating to time.
temporal concems, and the elegy provides an exarnple of poetic architecture that
also involves the reader-listener in the process. In a way reminiscent of the
mnemonic arts of memory, they often encourage us to imaginatively enter the
poem, and to move through the figurative stanzaic 'rmms' remembering. Their
elegies and homages are often built around architectural or spatial metaphors
which can assume a mimetic function in relation to aspects of the formal design.
Jahan Rarnazani notes how the elegiac genre is both a "literary construct."
and in psychoandytic terms, a --mimesis of mouming."~Melancholy and
achievement, any tnbute to the memory of the deceased marks a paean to the rebuilding and sheltenng power of poetry itself. In the line of Horace's "uere
Scc Joscph B rodsky Otr Grirf m d Runsotr: fiscrvs (Ncn. York: F m , 1996).
206
207
perenniirs" motif, the elegies of Heaney and Walcon are set to outlast the purely
Heaney states of his childhood that it was, "full of death: only the first couple
5 Giambattista Vico. Tlre N ~ i Science
v
of Ginrnhrrisrcr Vico. tms. Thomas Goddard Bcrpn and Mas
Harold Fisch ( 1744; I thrica NY:Comcil UP. 1948) 280.
fi
QKI.
in Jrigpi 27.
208
of times scary and strange." All that "submerged life and memory" comes
through in his poetry, d o n g with an acceptance of death as '3ust an ordinary fact
of life."' lrnplying rnastery, these assertions are based in a memory uniting the
perfunctory with the mysterious: 'This business of sitting al1 night in the wakehouse, it's inscrutable as the Red Indians, an inner system of courtesy and honour
and obligement.'% Decorum is associated with a particular architectural fom here.
as house becomes "wake-house." By extension. poetic form is converted into
sornething more by the turn to elegy: it too relies on an "inner system." The f o m s
of life translate death into a language that gives it a dimension of order. In his
elegies Heaney keeps this dimension constantly moving for the reader-listener,
defying the threat of atrophy in his aesthetic designs, making memory serve.
Transporting the eye and ear, form generates a narrative 'quickening.'
Vi negar Hill the rebels perish in their "Terraced thousandso' (DD 12). But the
spirits lay d a i m to the landscape as barley grows "up out of the grave" frorn their
pockets. The speaker's earlier description holds: "We moved quick and sudden
in our own country." Heaney's lines rehearse in their form what they signify,
each turning up the ground again to bear the "quick" of ancestral memory to the
209
reader-listener. Helen Vendler calls this a "resurrection-motif." She also draws
attention to how the use of sonnet form also functions as a reclamation on
Heaney's part. It afirms. she States, "that the old aristocratic genres have life in
them yet, and may be translated into poems defending rural values.'*lo The sonnet
repeats in its bounded, "fatal conclave" a meeting locked in the landscape's
mernory like a tum of season, or the retum of each line in rhyme. Remernbrance,
imagination and invention, to recall Vico's definition of memory. are intenvoven
in the gesture.
A link to ancient forms on the landscape is made in "Caim-rnaker."dedicated
to the Irish painter Barrie Cooke. In this homage, consisting of four squat
ownenhip. As Orla Murphy writes: "The Irish language not only represented a
code through which every mark on the land could be signified, defined and
elaborated; it also provided for the people a way of weaving themselves into the
land, through their own names and stories."i 1 Following their forebears, Cooke
and Heaney continue this process in the symbolic language of art.
In "Funeral Rites," from Nortlt. the ceremonial aspects defining the form of
-
--.
210
an Irish funeral are made a central issue by Heaney, as the architecturai becomes a
door into both memory, and archaic times. Set in three parts of eight, seven and
five quatrains respectively, the use of enjambment proves significant:
1 shouldered a kind o f manhood,
stepping in to lift the coffins
of dead relations.
They had been laid out
in tainted rooms,
their eyelids glistening,
their dough-whi te hands
shackied in rosary beads. (N 6)
The ernphasis that falls on "tainted mms" reminds us of the even 'layout' of the
lines in the stanzaic formation. Framed in the opening quatrain, the speaker's
body is metaphorically cast as an architectural foundation, "shouldering"
responsibility. stepped in like a door-pillar. Each part begins with a similar door
image. Throughout. the speaker observes details of the mouming process in a
detached manner. Kissing the "igloo brows" of the dead in these rooms prepares
the reader for the perverse domesticity of "neighbourly murder" in part II.
implies that the chambers are in min, and he will represent the original form anew.
This restoration finds its figurative equivalent in the poem's space. A vision is
em barked upon as Heane y begins inventing, re-troping the elegiac, imagining
-
1 2 A passage-gn\.c
21 1
how "family cars I nose into line," and the "whole country tunes / to the muffled
drumming // of ten thousand engines" (N 8).He imagines a collective sensory
immersion in the "slow triumph / towards the mounds." The part finishes with the
procession's serpent-like head on the threshold of the tomb, frarned in its
"megalithic doonvay." Heaney's restoration of the chamber tomb as a monument
works to make the structure a space where human symbolicdly meets the divine.
In part III the cortge departs. Using an idiomatic phrase. the speaker evokes
the poetic decorum of another epoch to describe the grave's closing: "When
they have put the Stone 1 back in its mouth." The sexualized imagery of the
tomb's penetration by living forces with the body implies that the ceremony has
brought a shared respite, the "cud of memory / allayed for once. arbitration / of
the feud placated." Yet it is the re-entry of imagination into the native recesses of
the chambers that marks the way Heaney sees the ritualistic power of poetry
triumphing, turning elegiac ruin into a site of transfonnation. This becomes a
vision shared, as the speaker pictures those driving north, "imagining those under
the hill." The tomb houses the dead, ennobled by association. "disposed like
Gunnar / who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound" (N 9). In an Orphic defiance
of death, his tongue refuses to be stilled:
Men said that he was chanting
verses about honour
and that four lights bumed
in corners of the chamber:
which opened then. as he tumed
with a joyful face
to look at the moon.
Gunnar's chanting" precipitates the translation into the afterlife, made
"
2 12
traverseci, line by line.
The world-opening prospect of poetry is celebrated in "Funeral Rites."
Heaney implies that the restoration of forms to affirm endunng values carries its
own imaginative and ethical imperative. In Field Work. a collection he has
described as " full of public elegies." fom's redress is felt strongly in ternis of his
poetic architecture.1 3 The dedications to severai poems appear almost incised in
Stone. reinforcing the monumental aspect. '.The Strand at Lough Beg" bears the
epitaph: "IN MEMORY OFCOLUM MCCARTNEY-' (FW 17). Heaney again works
through memory and imagination to invent something of lasting meaning from the
violent sectarian killing of his cousin. He restores McCartney to the rural temtory
he knerv. centenng on an architectural image in Lough Beg: "Church Island's
spire, its soft treeline of yew." The tone remains unsettled, however. Guns "fired
behind the house" are recailed, and matten of voice and its goveming: "talkers
in byres. / Slow arbitrators of the buriai ground." Related to bower. a "byre" is a
sweeping of your feet 1 Has stopped behind me" (FW 18).The tum is also
explicitly to Dante (who supplies the epigraph) in the last lines, as the speaker
prepares the body for paradise, emulating Virgil in Pugcliory Canto 1:
1 dab you clear with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the a r m s and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, 1 plait
Green scapulars to Wear over your shroud.
213
The laying out arranges McCartney's body in the bier of the poem's formal
architecture. Like the "Laureate Hearse" of Milton's Lycida. the lineaments of
form restore, puning things into proper symmetry in memory through invention. 14
At once vestment, a bandage and wings. the "scapulars" imply a heaiing
transformation. In Purgatorio Cato tells Virgil to gird Dante's waist with a reed,
though Heaney chooses an image of plaiting, which carries with it the rhetorical
charge of ploce in the repetition of "green."W3oth girding and plaiting are apt
metaphon for the restorative work of memory in the elegy, organizing and
securing through form. But this treatment of McCartney+onstricted within a
Dantesque translation-is also seen as problematic by Heaney in a later poern. As
the bitter remarks of the McCartney figure to the persona of "Station Island"
demonstrate, Heaney visualizes what he creates here as an over-astheticized
'house' as well: "*you whitewashed ugliness and drew 1 the lovely blinds of the
P ~ i r p f o r i o/ and saccharined my death with morning dew"' (SI83).He fears
A bridge image dominates the opening of "A Postcard from North Antrim,"
composed in memory of Sean Armstrong and comprising nine seven-line stanzas.
Heaney details the bridge in ternis which allude to his own lines, going o n to use
it as an underlying metaphor for the poem's whole shifting structure:
1957) 124.
1 5 ~ d a m s116.
2 15
shoulder / For the first time." The voice now gushes: "'Oh, Sir Jasper, do not
touch me!' / You roared across at me, / Chorus-leading, splashing out the wine."
Armstrong observes the speaker as he inaugurally 'girds' bis future wife with his
a m . foreshadowing his own reluctant enclosure in Heaney 's elegiac form. Voice
thus marks a final crossing in restored memory, raised like a g l a s , or the roof at
this party whose floor Armstrong holds. He is heard a last time, at least in a
"Ghost written" sense, "roar[ingl across" at the speaker, as if calling from the
swaying rope bridge that opens the poem.
Though Heaney refers to Armstrong's voice as a pulpit, the lasting image is of
the ntualistic joy of communal festivities. This public warrnth is maintained in the
first stanza of the three-part "Casualty." But the pub where Louis O'Neill dnnks
is decirnated in a bomb-blast. Recalling their conversations on fishing and poetry.
the speaker still feels his presence: -'my tentative art / His tumed back watches
too" (FW 22). Heaney retums him in his lines, restonng his memory. "[Bllown to
bits" for breaking a curfew, O'Neill's death follows the shooting of thirteen
THIRTEEN 1.. - 1 BOGSIDE NIL." Heaney rememben this graffiti in his elegiac
architecture with a docurnentary realism. though he now begins to shift into a
visionary mode of recall, the temporal opened up by the spatial emphasis.
Part II describes the funeral of the thirteen in surreal images: "Coffin after
coffin I Seemed to float from the door / Of the packed cathedral."
216
ominously toned communality is exploited through architectural imagery. ''1 see
him tumed 1 In that bombed offending place," he exclaims, though the vision of
his "cornered outfaced stare" is "turned" or troped in Heaney's elegiac form as
well. O'Neill was lured to the tavern as one of the "warm lit-up places" he
coveted. As the speaker. back inside the bar in his memory, ponden how culpable
the dead man could be held for breaking the cudew. and the "tribe's cornplicity,"
a ghost-voiced rejoinder is heard: '"Puzzle me / The right answer to that one"'
(FW 23). The recall in memory, and restoration of this architectural topos in the
poem. allows Heaney to continue in his imagination the discoune they once
shared.
Using cortge irnagery sirnilar to "Funeral Rites," Heaney begins part III with
a confession that he missed O'Neill's burial. But a 'passage' is worked out in
refiexive terms through the invention of a consolatory trope. Acting as a
rnetaphor of transformation, the moving line of funeral walkers are described as
"Shoaling out of his lane." Heaney lets this 'line' lead him back into a memory of
fishing. Taken out in O'Neill's boat one dawn. the speaker remembers how the
%ne lifted, hand 1 Over fist." He recalls how he "tasted freedom" with him in this
experience: "To get out early, haul / Steadily off the bottom, / Dispraise the
catch" ( F W 24). An association with poetic making is evoked:
As you find a rhythm
ellipsis. An opening out ont0 (white) space occurs, not unlike the troping of
Gunnar's tornb as finally 'unroofed7 in scope. But the run-on of "beyond ...
.a
217
uns peakable. "16 In "Casualty" the latter predominates due to the way O'Neill
died, but as Heaney mns out this line, the two factors combine. The final threeline stanza casts O'Neill as a "revenant" of rnemory, a "Plodder through
midnight min," so that he lives on outside the elegy on the threshold of Heaney's
imagination. Directed to his memory, the parting imperative-"Question me
again"-insists upon this connection. an extension of their tavem rapport.
A determination to frarne the unspeakable rather than rnourn the loss of
expression marks "The Singer's House," where the potential min is restored in a
different light. Heaney wrote the poem in the wake of a sectarian bombing attack
which forced the cancellation of a recording session he was due to attend with a
musician fnend. His response signals defiance of such a curtailing of art and life.
the eight quatrains affirming the title in lyric design as a formidable power. They
channei the strength of association sounded in specific names, a force felt in the
initial spatializing invocation: "When they said Currickfergus I could hear 1 the
frosty echo of saltminen' picks" ( F W 27). He imagines it, "chambered and
glinting. / a township built of light." The name is that of an Irish coastal castle and
i ts surrounding town, here foregrounded in pronunciation and imaginativeiy
altered in the 'chamber' of the quatrain. Yet the speaker asks where the new
fonns and narnes are going to rise from: 'What do we Say any more / to conjure
the salt of our earth?" It is this loss that is potential cause for lament as well: "So
much cornes and is gone / that shouid be crystal and kept." Heaney tums to the
word-forms as a means of reconnection, garnering them in his lines.
Carrickfergus Castle is reconfigured in the blank verse of Heaney's 'house,' a
move preceding his sounding of another name at the singer's home:
1 fi W. Da\.id S h a ~ .Efegv
,
arrd Sikrtce:
1992) 39.
"shoulder to the jamb" presents him at work, in the same manner as Heaney's
words, enjambing his quatrains, making them sing. 17 The poem's final quatrain
recalls how the singer was always about his work when the speaker fini came.
He tells him: "Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear," as the raising of
melody is accorded a quasi-mythical power of incantation. A determination is
urged, to believe in art, despite the elegiac circumstances that pervade life. As in
"A Postcard from North Antrim," the raising of voice is given the function of
bridging. T h e poetic architecture encourages the connection.
17 'Jamb.' from ihc Old Frcnch jambe. or 'kg' rcfcrs io a sidc post or sidc of a doomay, \vindon or
fircp1ac.e.
219
"The Singer's House," where the seal responds to the speaker's singing of
Baptist hymns. his curiosity piqued. As Bonnie Costello notes. Bishop's detailed
description of the five fishhouses anticipates the "spiritual Fortress the speaker
evokes later [...] when she sings 'A Mighty Fortress 1s Our God."' and suggests
a faith in solidity shaken by the sea's elemental flux.18 But Heaney's visionary
assertion of Carrickfergus shrinks down to the turf-shed and the rowboat. These
humble foms symbolize a knowledge that can also be counted upon to uplift.
Like Bishop and her seal, Heaney looks to the singer to be "a believer in total
immersion.'-19 This is also an encouragement to ernulate Bishop in her sense as
maker; her "trust in poetic forrn and its abnegation of self' (RP 184). Heaney's
analogy of the row-boat to the vehicle of Song plays upon the notion of (lyric)
craft by borrowing again from Purgutory. an idea crucial to his elegy for
Lowell.zo
Spatial motifs cclave to the craft metaphor in "Elegy" aided by images of
line-casting, word-weaving and design. Consisting of fourteen quatrains. the
emphasis falls on Lowell as maker. "the master elegist I and welder of English."
nding on the "swaying tiller" of himself (FW 3 1). Heaney calls him: "helmsman,
netsman. re/iuriits." a designer of girding forms ( F W 32).21 Alluding to Dante,
Lowell is figured as a "night ferry 1 thudding in a big sea," his poetic vessels
subject to alteration from within: "the whole craft ringing 1 with an armourer's
music." His impact on poetry is felt in the course he set "wilfully across 1 the
l x Bonnic Cosicllo. L=li=rr&rlrBishop: Qiresrioru- of Mastep (Cambridge. MA: Hanard
UP. 1 9 9 3 ) 1 1 1.
1 'J' Elifabcth Bishop. Tlw Corrrplete Poernr 1927- 1979 (Ncu. York: Noonday. 1994)65.
20 Thc opcning icrcci r a d s : "For bcttcr waters. now, thc littlc bark I of rny pocric powcrs hoists ILS ssiils, 1
and Ica\ cs bchind thar cniclcst of thc scas." Dante Alighieri. TIte Divine Cornedy. Vol. I I , P~rrgcrto-. trans.
Mark Musa (Nc\v Y o r k Pcnguin. 1985). Canto 1: 1-3, 2.
2 1 A "ncrmrtn" in thc gladitorial scnsc. a reriarimmay rcfcr also to a ropc o r nct-makcr. Cf. Hcrtncy's
"Full Fx-c" cssay: 'That founccn-linc stanm o r blank sonncc which h c uscd compulsivcly during thc ycars
al'tcr Nmr rhe OC'YCIIIwas an attcm pt to gct n m c r thc quick o lifc. i o c a p thc minute" (P22 1-22).
220
ungovernable and dangerous." Heaney sets Lowell 's memory in a properly
ordered form, as this heavily endstopped Iine pays homage to a singular vision.
Imitation and invention constantly inform his elegiac architecture. The final verses
gravitate to Glanmore to partake of a moment, "opulent and restorative" in a
farewell by the gate, where he gives the last word to Lowell: "'1'11 pray for
you. "* As in "Casualty," the fonn is left open with his echoed voice, balanced on
the threshold of memory.
* * *
An association of particular architectural f o m s with a poet occun in another
quatrain-based elegy, a figure ultimately troped spatially hirnself. The description
of the bronze statue of a Great War soldier in the first two quatrains of "ln
Memoriam Francis Ledwidge" sets in motion a dialogue between (monumental)
foms. in order that Heaney c m probe hidden recesses in memory. The "loyal,
fallen names on the embossed plaque" the speaker remembers reading as a boy
1.. . 1 Ghosting the trenches with a bloom of hawthorn / O r silence cored from a
Boyne passage-grave" ( F W 60). Another architectural site he has inherited, the
22 1
Boyne tomb relates to the frozen image of the bronze soldier earlier, anticipating
his fate. Yet, bringing his voice in, a central c m x of the elegy is the distress
Ledwidge feels at being designated: "'a British soldier while my country 1 Has n o
place among nations."' As Ioan Davies states, Heaney is drawn repeatedly to
"riven situations," violent combinations of stress and strain both buttressing and
disordering Irish lives histoncally.22 The phrase pinpoints an irresolution, a crisis
state of affairs from which Heaney dialectically taps energy.
The identification o f Ledwidge with the poemOs'situation' is an indirect
corollary of his identification with its sites, architecturally figured-forth in the
disem bodied presence he evokes; a final silence of the inexpressi ble. In the third
to last quatrain his 'riven' condition is alluded to: "You were rent / By shrapnel
six wee ks later." The penultimate quatrain provides the crucial tie-in, however:
persondity-that one and the same p e n o n can be a Catholic and a British soldier,
a poet and a fighter, a lover of the Irish countryside and a war-victim in Ypres."zs
But matters are made more complex by the relation between architecture and
form the elegy dramatizes in its emphasis on criss-crossing tensions. Bringing us
to a specific vantage point, Heaney's image metaphorically depicts Ledwidge's
body like a building, a skeletal framework drawing in the previous sites and
structures by analogy. The next lines retum the focus t o the bronze statue, but in
a way which implicates it with these places in monumentai fom. An echo of the
'' uere pere~nius"motif-the monument set to outlast bronze-can be heard, as
Heaney raises the question of whether the elegy itself escapes the "useless
2 2 Imn D i k . CVrirrrs in Prison (Oxford: Blackwcll, 1990) 137.
23 Vcndlcr 64.
222
equilibnum" expressed in Ledwidge's predicament.
With Tite Huw Lantern, vernacular architecture continues to be used as a
topos by Heaney in the elegy, aiding memory. In "The Stone Verdict," Heaney
imagines his father standing in the "judgment place" of the afterlife awaiting his
fate (HL 17). A "lifetime's speechlessness" behind him, in the second stanza his
self-containment becomes a mythic incarceration in the speaker's eyes:
Let it be like the judgment of Hermes,
God of the Stone heap, where the stones were verdicts
Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him
Until he stood waist deep in the cairn
Of his apotheosis: maybe a gate pillar
O r a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence
Sotnebody will break at last to Say, 'Here
His spirit lingers,' and will have said too much.
Enacted by the reticent p e t - s o n who himself fears saying too much, the standing
place of the stanza marks the transformative space wherein his own breath, as
inspiriting force, stands in for the lost father. Reminiscent of the unroofed
wallstead in "Squarings," discussed in chapter two, the house ruins evoke an
elegiac silence suffused with rnemory and presence.24Their fonns are given hints
of an electncal current in the 'earthing' metaphor. Lines from "The Hermit" are
recalled. The father is also depicted "like a ploughshare / interred to sustain the
whole field / of Force" (SI 109).25 The "cairn / Of his apotheosis" is invented, and
charged with meaning by Heaney's elegiac architecture.
remembers this p e t and translater of classical verse. Like "Bone Dreams," the
-
2-1 Olhcr ancicnl stonc sinicturcs arc rccdlcd. Cf. Hcaney's commcnts on thc 'non-vcrbal' male irorld of his
f'rithcr: "M.fathcr iras a crcaturc of rhc archaic world, rcally. Hc ivould have bcen cniircly rit homc in a
223
speaker takes the reader-listener on a joumey into an ancient forrn. The entry to
the poem occurs in a doubled, reflexive metaphoncal sense, as an artifact is
architecturalized through the "language of forms" Heaney relies upon:
The socket of each axehead like the squared
Doonvay to a megalithic tomb
With its slabbed passage that keeps opening forward
To face another corbelled stone-faced door
That opens on a third. There is no 1 s t door,
Just threshold stone, stone jambs, stone crossbeam
Repeating enter, enfer, enter. enter.
Lintel and upright fly past in the dark. (HL 22)
Entry brings us into the passage-grave over a threshold that keeps receding, a
sensation caught in the way the third line propels both voice and eye in extended
fashion. holding them in suspension. The octave's layout evokes a labyrinth
mirroring the tomb's architecture as repetition of words like "face" in the next
line, and "door" create sensations of doubling-back in a maze. confusing the ear
as much as the eyc. Repetition develops momentum as the opening of each door
enter'' draws the reader-listener into the poem's formal unison of voice and
224
symbolized by the arrow. but also the questing trajectory of his thought.26 The
traces of "whispered breath" are also the inspiring revenants of his voice. Out of
the tomb's claustrophobic density comes a freeing of events ont0 another
temporally-attuned plane of regard. The architectural becomes the enabling
rnetaphor for this transition. Heaney again gestures beyond the frame of
imagining: "out of al1 knowing." He designs his sonnet to order Fitzgerald's
rnemory in a new perspective. as the spatial is opened out by his imagery.
The sonnet sequence. "Glanmore Revisited." begins with an elegy for Tom
Delaney under the narne "Scrabble." Heaney tentatively walks us inside the
cottage in his opening lines: "Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold. 1 Our
back might never warm up but our faces 1 Burned from the hearth-blaze and the
hot w hiskeys" (ST3 1 ). Here the sonnet itself also feels like "An old / Rightness
half-irnagined or foretold." The same insular ordering coheres in f o m to seal the
rnemory against the elements: "whatever rampaged out there couldn't reach us, /
towards inhabiting such a "pure form" (ST35). The notion of 'breaking and
entering' is queried in the sestet: "Only pure words and deeds secure the house."
The symbolic placement of the elegy over the lintel of the sequence acts as a
reminder of the dangers of letting the spirit become too cornplacent.
26 Hc;inc~in\.okcs lincs from a Mandclstrun Iyric which ask: " k h c r c will thc shrift / Of II\-ingthought
Ily'!'. Osip Manddstam, Osip Maticlelstmn: Selected Poems, t r i s . Jmcs Grccnc (London; Rngui n, 1 s )
12.
225
With the last sonnet. 'The Skylight," this ruminative mood is decisively
broken as the octave-sestet divide i s used to express an architectural transition
that riddles death and pays new homage to Delaney's mernory. The attic becomes
a space of transformation figuratively corresponding to the sonnet's:
the octave. The alteration, like the volta, marks a "pure deed" as it breaks into the
speaker's writing den, upsetting the old order. This addition of the skylight
becomes a metaphor for the renovation of spirit. framing a healing that tmmps
mortal i ty . Delaney partakes of this roof-opening by association-similar, once
more. to the unroofing of Gunnar's tomb. Heaney's "tongue-and-groove"
sonnet form thrusts an old, well-worn lair into the symbolic light of renewal.
form of measurement, and this congruous element in his name is played upon. The
five six-line stanzas make up three parts, the first and third simply one stanza
226
each. the second, three. Through this formal ordering Heaney measures his voice
into units of breath and silence, volumes that pay tribute to Ellmann's spirit. The
lament begins:
are evoked: "It could have been the drenched weedy gardens / of Peredelkino."
From Pasternak, the reverie shifts to "Athens Street where William Alfred stood /
On the wet doorstep, remembering the friend / Who died at sixty" (ST49).
Their
words offset the speaker's brmding as the final part revises the first:
The eaves a water-fringe and steady lash
Of summer downpour: You are streprd iti lucl;.
1 hear them Say, Steeped. steeped. steeped in Iuck.
And hear the flood too, gathering from under,
Biding and boding like a rnastenvork
O r a named name that overbrims itself.
NOW merely a ''summer" min, a metaphorical sense of the "veranda" as
entry the speaker makes into a temporal reverie in the middle part. and this helps
reorder his perspective in a consolatory light.
227
Another master, Mandelstam, is recalled elegiacally through the structural
vibrations of voice in "M." frorn The Spirit Level.
When the deaf phonetician spread his hand
Over the dome of a speaker's skull
He could tell which diphthong and which vowel
By the bone vibrating to the sound.
A globe stops spinning. 1 set my palm
O n a contour cold as permafrost
And imagine axle-hum and the steadfast
Russian of Osip Mandelstam. (SL 57)
The sounding of the skull evokes an image of tuning forks: both the phonetician
and the speaker "vibrating" in symbiosis with the presence of language. By his
use of "dome" Heaney extends the imaginative plane further, invoking the skull
as the temple of this linguistic resonance, an inwardly echoing space. The skull is
transformed into a mode! for the world. a "globe," attuned to the memory of
Mandelstam whose presence is felt in the depths of this vaulting. An image of
train wheels halting on tracks is called to mind. recalling his death in a transit
camp near Vladivostok. The speaker animates his memory through the 'kxlehum" and the -'steadfastness of speech articulation" he traces in the "Russian."
If the pen-name initial of the title cornes to rest in the full naming of the last line, it
also suggests how Heaney's f o m structures his own voice architecturally to hit
off the intoned name and resound. Together the hvo quatrains make up the
halves of a tuning fork pitched to the key of "MWthat give us pause, adjusting
the ear properly to his memory.
It is no accident that "MWprecedes "An Architect." In this elegy mernory
again functions as a means for remembrance. imaginative shift and invention. The
six tercets are extended to their limits by the demands of Heaney's line scheme.
Yet the form rernains sure throughout due to the controlling influence of voice
which exacts a clean 'passage' for the eye and ear. An underlying empathy is
228
shared with the architect, generating a colloquial tone. The opening line: "He
fasted on the doorstep of his gift," implies a penchant for extremes and the way
his talent, while steeped in tradition, still hungers for further challenges (SL 58). A
metaphorical connection of his Iife and work to the elegiac form memorializing
him is also established. For he now inhabits the speaker's "doorstep." the
threshold of memory the line represents. He is framed in the tercet: "Exacting
more, minding the boulder / And the raked zen gravel." This image of ascetic
evoked by the memory, Heaney re-imagines the architect as a mythical sea god,
drawing him into a specific literary tradition.27 Like the poet himself in the way he
re-enters "sites and truths." the art and life are seen as joined together. Taking
irnpetus from Milton's description of Lycidas as a builder of the "lofty rhyme,"
2' Thc archircct's portraya1 hints al a Titan; a bound9-mlcr. in thc tradition of O c u n u s in Jonson's
Masque oJI3lac.krtes.s. Danicl 's Terlys ' Fesfjvd, ,Mil ton's Carnits and Keats's Hyperiort. Scc Dan S.
Yorton and Pclcrs Rushron. CInssicd M y h v in Er~glislrLifernlirre (Ncw York: Rinchart, 1952) 328.
229
the speaker praises the intimate knowiedge of the "language of fonns" the
technique of this '-Genius of the shore" revealed.28 The changing shapes on the
paiimpsests of imagination and drawing board mark access to a space where
possibilities are "drawn-out" with a hydraulic, protean ease. This last line
represents the inexhaustible reach of the formal process-"organic and
contrived" in character-prompting a resort to the elliptic signifier once more.
Heaney senses a "higher mmd" in the strain behind the architect's strain, to
again invoke Milton. and his own words regarding the deep listening in to voice
certain poetry encourages: "As if the ripple at its widest desired to be verified by
a re-formation of itself, to be drawn in and drawn out through its point of origin"
(CP 521.29 The tercet is left open to signify the eddying strains of this "reformation." itself a drawing board dive with the things of a shared language. The
speaker imagines the architect still caught up in his ideas in the last lines:
Exit now, in his tweeds. down an aisle between
Drawing boards as far as the eye can see
To where it can't until he sketches where. (SL 58)
--
23 1
his days," Heaney's own forms praise in tum. They take account of the desire to
"outpace." as caught in another quatrain: "Jarnmed enjambements piling up / As
you went above the top." The same impulse is celebrated in Ellrnann and the
anonymous architect. Fighting stasis, Heaney's architectonic form allusively
references Brodsky's life and poetics, keeping faith with the notion that to go
"above the top" first requires constraint if it is to have meaning.
Looking into Ted Hughes's 'Birthday Letters"' appeared a few weeks prior to
the poet's death. In section two Heaney reads the poem as a structure of
initiation:
of the bridge metaphor to the "upper room" an imaginative rebirth occurs for the
3.3 Scamus Hcaney, "On Frst Looking into TcJ Huphcs's 'Birthda)' Lcttcrs."' New Yorker 5- 12 e t . 19%:
W.Cf. Lmvcll's "For John B c ~ m a n "with its sub-titlc, "Aftcr r d i n g his lasi I h a m Sotrg," which
conrriins in affirmation thc linc: '20 lcap from the bridge." Robert bwcll, Dav by f h v (New York: F m .
1978) 38. Cf. dso ihc allusion to John Kcats's "On E r s t Looking into Chapmm's i-iomcr" in Hcancy's
ii tlc, and thc scnsc of spatio-temporal boundarics fdling away that cach pocm c\-nkcs.
232
speaker through memory of the "railway child" inside. The final lines leave us
with an affirmation sirnilar to that of "The Skylight," "Funeral Rites," and other
elegies rvhich effect a passage through stone-like density into light's reiease.
Heaney works the elusive material of memory in the confines of formal process to
a point where this opening-out may occur.
A final elegy, "A Hyperborean," shows Heaney adopting a different angle of
approach. However. he again makes his choice of form a part of the homage, as an
architectural connection metaphorically creates the scene:
Ruined temples. Poetry. Zbigniew Herbert,
The inside of your head was a littered Delphi
Where satellites and eagles sailed in orbit
Above the god's besieged hiIl sanctuary
And the oracle was the one thing still uncensored,
The via sucra a viu crucis partly
And part1y actual stone, the untransfigured
Hill itself. Y ou were a Hyperborean-14
Addressing the memory of Hgrbert, who died in 1998. the speaker again sounds
the name like a tuning fork, as in "M." But the opening line refers reflexively to
Heaney's own use of sonnet form as a mode1 as well. its specific "temple in the
hearing" evoked once more (PW 32).-'sHerbert is associated with the "oracle,"
the egg-shaped stone of the onlphalos, centrally placed in Delphi. However, in
his head it merges into a n image of Calvary (whose etymology lies in the Latin
and Greek words for 'skull,' mlvuria and golgotha). The radical fusion informs
his "uncensored" lyric voice the speaker implies, as "One of those at the back of
the north wind / Whom Apollo favored and kept going back to." This is the
Poland whose winter silence he would fill, keeping "summer's promise" alive. His
poetic voice acted as a civilizing instrument: "You learned the lyre from him and
kept it tuned." The tuning was made to the "satellites and eagles," twinned
34 Scamus Hcancy, "A Hypcrborm." New Yorker 18-25 .lm. 1W:56.
35 CL'. Hcanc>.'s comrncnt in "Arlas or Civili-/;itionWon Hcrbcrt: 'Thc ground-hugging sturdiness which hc
rccognizcs and chcrishcs in a r c h i c buildings has its analoguc in hts o ~ down-tecrthncss"
~ n
(G'T56).
233
signals on an ancient frequency. The sonnet structure is Heaney's homage to
Herbert's work, "the exactions of its logic, the temperance of its tone, [the]
equanirnity of its recognitions" (GT54.36 Yet these factors present in the form
act in accord with the totality of the poem as a whole. Justice is accorded to
Herbert's memory in the ordenng of the elegiac architecture, restoring the
'temple' in a proper perspective, while giving matten a new turn.
As Mandelstam States: "To build means to contend with the void, to
hypnotize space."J7 In the majonty of elegies discussed here Heaney invokes
architecture as a rnetaphor enabling him to achieve this goal. In fact, spatial
irnagery becomes vital if the temporal truths of memory are to be poetically
realized in the poems. As in the use of the Boyne chamben. evoked several times,
the architectural is often associated with the ceremonid. He uses a combination of
irnagery and f o n to make metaphors of bridging, crossing, girding and framing
active in the remembering voice's encounter with the dead. In the Field Work
elegies in particular. Heaney develops a relationship between specific places and
remembrance that allows him to evoke visionary scenarios. But in homages such
as -'Cairn-makei' and "The Singer's House," a ntual awareness of sites as topoi
for memory is evident as well. Several of the elegies test the lirnits of language,
form, and Heaney's powers of invention when faced with silence. Consistent
throughout is the way architecture is involved in a process of animating and
transforming memory.
234
homage of formai structure. Remernbrance, revision and re-invention are also key
elernents, as he draws on Dante and Whitman arnong other p e t s to larnent lost
friends and causes. Architectural imagery is deployed as a means of evoking other
tirne-periods, as well as organizing memory in his p e m s of "moumful tnbute," as
Ramazani ternis the elegiac homage.38 The trust in form is keyed differently from
ternplate is "Ohio, Winter," dedicated to the poet James Wright. The observer
picks out "clenched. rvhi te / barns" on the winter landscape (SG 59). Walcott's
Trees of Life, What Are Your Signs of Winter?"' Written for "E. S." and
consisting of two nonce stanzas of unequal length, the poem begins disarmingly
as Walcott's lyric persona confides: "So, suddenly, when he died. 1 She wanted
this blue vase / They'd seen in a show-window" (C 47). This sets in motion a
reflexive dialogue between f o m s that are made to cany the weight of memory, as
the vase takes on an emblematic power. The mourning woman. her "vision glazed
with shock," states: "'Place this on a ledge / in winter, it irradiates Stockholm."'
So 1 imagine her
This winter a t a window,
Shawled, in an empty room
Wi th two forgetting children,
In the blue globe 1 brought
Her when h e died, her thought
Whirled rmtlessl y li ke snow .
The "blue sphere" is made to encapsulate a world, its constraining bubble
talismanic of grief. like the seaside trinket, a "toy grotto," in Heaney's "Station
Island." that "housed the snowdrop weather of [al death / long ago" (SI67).The
gneving woman lives inside the memory, a form symbolized by the "room" in the
globe. Forrnally the stanzas point to the way architectural containment is vital to
rernembrance. The elegy's "mirnesis of mouming" frarnes a process locked in
thrall to winter, the memory ruminatively enclosed and repeated in its f o m . as the
speaker "enspheres al1 circumstance" in hi s imagination. Waicon's stanzas turn
his own recalled thoughts over, an aspect of the conceit about them.
A transformation of Walcott's melancholy into consolation is more apparent
in an elegy set in New York City. A journey out of stasis is navigated over the
three parts. Written for John Robertson, "A Village Life," shows Waicott's form
taking on a sprawling, discursive quality, as a trawl through the city's winter
depths is remembered. A rnounting sense of alienation from the city acts as the
correlative to the numb despair felt in the wake of Robertson's death. From a
room overlooking Greenwich Village, we are drawn into the setting:
Through the wide, grey loft window.
1 watched that rvinter morning, my first snow
crusting the sill, puzzle the black.
nuzzling tom. Behind my back
a rime of crud glazed my cracked coffee-cup,
a snowfall of tom poems piling up
heaped by a rhyming spade.
Starved, on the prowl,
1 was a frightened cat in that grey city. (G 5)
The spatial emphasis is directed toward an evocation of the past. Through such
236
images architectural spaces organize the details of the speaker's experience,
frarning his memones. The breaking of the rhyme scheme in the last line, to retum
only sporadically. signifies the improvised trajectory the n s t of the elegy will
follow as the speaker's ennui, hornesickness and sense of loss are described. A
strong empathy with the dead arises where roles are revened: "All thai winter 1
haunted / your house on Hudson Street, a tiring friend, / demanding to be taken
in, drunk, and fed." He describes how his own stare in a "frosted pane'' appears
In part II, a descent into familiar mythopoeic territory takes place.40 Waicott
makes the Underground an analogue for Hades, an idea his stage version of The
Odyssq also uses. He uses metamorphic effects to shape the imagery:
4 )For
237
daylight, whirled I apart Iike papers from a vent." evoking an image of the Sibyl's
leaves blown asunder by the cavern doors in the Aeneid With growing
frequency the speaker begins refemng to a generalized "we," a strategy for
including the reader-listener in the fonn's momentum more implicitly. This gives
Walcott's mythic tone in the narrative a force that makes his imitation tap
collective as well as individual memory,relating us to Robertson. The descent into
this subterranean architecture and the "iron cell" of the car to encounter his
shade, is portrayed as a test that must be endured if his spirit is to be carried over,
restored.
The persona's equation of mourning with a feeling of k i n g (architecturally)
oppressed by New York subsides in part III. Having passed through rernembrance
and revision. departure from the city for a pastoral idyll is troped. Walcotfs
placement of caesurae and the use of enjarnbment now has a retarding effect.
easing the prosodic tension previously generated:
Going away, through Queens we pass
a cemetery of miniature skyscrapers. The verge
blazes its rust, its taxi-yellow leaves. It's fall.
1 stare through glass,
my own reflection there, at
empty avenues, lawns, spires, quiet
stones, where the curb's rim
wheels westward, westward, where thy bones.. -41
Montana, Minnesota, your real
America, lost in tall g r a s , serene idyll. (G 7-8)
The tombstoned city of the dead alluded to in the second line is left behind. a
move stressed in the falling away of the lines to a new transparency of glass. The
speaker's reflection returned to him, his gaze becomes the vehicle of a refreshed
clan ty. that alights on "quiet / stones." His mind ranges in homage to Robertson.
whose sou1 is imagined translated out of the city into the ideal fonns of a "real I
-
A n ccho or Lvciuis lincs 154-56: "Ay mc! Whilsi thcc the shorcs and sounding S w 1 Wrish far alvriy.
u.hcrc'cr thy boncs arc hurl'd [. .-1." Milton 124.
-( 1
238
America. lost." As the run-on line beginning "wheels w e s t w a r d implies with
ellipsis, the motion is without end: towards another "vacant centre," in the words
of Heaney's Fitzgerald elegy.
public, private pain, / wincing, already statued." In the last of the five stanzas an
image of a 'house' is framed through metaphors which open out onto history:
23 9
presence re-housing historical victors against the spectral memory of those left
li ke the Cheyennes, moving, disptaced.
Ideals die like sentient beings in Walcott's eyes, and architecture is the
metaphor for a grievous loss of potential in another elegiac poem delving deep
into history, as collective 'epic memory.' Where "A City's Death by Fire" heralds
change, chapter sixteen of Another Li&, entitled "The Cement Phoenix." laments
the new form Castries takes as it is rebuilt. Earlier, in chapter five, the persona
recalls watching:
on black hills of imported anthracite
the frieze of coal-black carriers, cltarhonniers,
erect, repetitive as hieroglyphs
descending and ascending the steep ramps,
building the pyramids (AL 29)
The symbolic achievement of these pyramids lies behind his lament for what
could have k e n ; a city built on transformed principles along classic, yet radically
new lines.42 Opening the chapter, the afterrnath of the fire is depicted:
Meanwhile to one metre, in the bumt town
things found the memory of their former places,
that vase of roses slowly sought its centre
like a film reeled backward, like
a pol tergeist reversed. (AL 103)
In the frst line Walcott plays on "metre" to evoke a worksong, though the
architectonic relation to form is caught in as well, in the measurement of Castries'
re-ordering, and his own scansion. An outline of this 'reversal' continues:
"Trames drew their portraits like a closing rose. 1 laces resumed their spinsterish
precision / and parlours were once more varnished, sacrosanct." The old habits of
mind are resumed as well.
240
inflected dialect. His tone contracts with suppressed rage. A fresh death is felt in
the messianic. history-making promise of the cernent design spread before him.
Walcott's own stanzaic 'blocks' sit in elegiac repose as the potential for
transformation fades. They monumentalize lost hope. the death of his dream (a
city devoted to art from the ground up). A sudden lacuna in the middle of one
verse signifies this absence, a space set in juxtaposition to such 'progress':
New cernent blocks
five or six stories high
in their didactic Welfare State severity,
boulevards short of breath
confronted the old town.
From the verandah of the old wooden college
1 watched the turning pages of the sea. (AL 104)
Offset in the form, just as they are out of place in the landscape in Walcott's eyes,
the image of blank. faceless buildings suggest "blocks" freely hovering in
isolation from the community . The endstopping denotes a precarious balance, the
words. like concrete dominoes, apt to topple at a touch. In the metaphor of the
24 1
boulevards as "short of breath." Walcott's sense of how the city's architectural
language is norv infected by negative foms is asserted. The speaker, as in a warzone. smells "Bunit fiesh. Our blitz was over too." Persisting in uncovering
historical parallels to describe the symbolic magnitude of the calarnity witnessed,
he feels "the voices of children" under his feet: '"Sad has slain his thousand, /
David his ten thousand."' Beyond the Biblical parallel, the fire's decimation is
seen to have a typology in the Middle Passage, and the Holocaust. The "voices"
inform the lines with memory ;the vesse1 of Walcott's voice carries their "feet" in
the connective strains of his elegiac architecture.
The lament thus extends in design to invoke a diasporic community: '-The
bones of our Hebraic faith were scattered / over such a desert, burnt and
brackened gorse." Walcon draws in the elegiac forms of ancient Egypt once
more as the speaker imagines: "shoes / of cherubs piled in pyramids / outside the
Aryan ovens." Re-imagined as funerary monuments to the Holocaust dead, he
then proceeds to overlay the imagery to refer to the coal pyramids on the Castries
wharf. Though a Dantesque encounter with a ghost poet and fellow --exile." one
of the "survivors of the death-camps and the soap-vats," takes place, the onus
rook in an unroofed tower" (SI 1 10). Through five unrhymed stanzas, varying
between eight and eleven Iines in length, the spirit of Neruda is traced on
243
This wreck figures for Neruda's body, a niined form whose sound echoes on with
Orphic persistence. as the speaker asks: "Why this loop of correspondences, 1 as
your voice grows hoarser 1 than the chafed PacificT' Generating an image of
upwards rnovement, the %op" matches the spiraling ascent tracked in the
stanza, as Neruda's voice is compared to condor feathen, "falling soundless as
snow o n 1 the petrified Andes." Walcon lifis the reader-listener to a giddy
encounter with an "emissary in a black suit, who 1 walks among eagles," in
sublime fashion:
Hear the ambassador of velvet
open the felt-hinged door,
the black flag flaps toothless
over Isla Negra. You said
when others like me despaired:
climb the rnoss-throated stairs
to the crest of Macchu Picchu,
break your teeth like a pick on
the obdurate, mottled terraces,
Wear the wind, soaked with rain
like a cloak, above absences (SG 60-61)
This "door" is both a mouth and a dwelling place, an acoustic structure
conflating Neruda's tonal characteristics of voice with a setting at once artificial
and naturai. The Chilean poet's advice is remembered as the speaker arrives at the
voice's source to undergo a process of initiation.
The penultirnate stanza maintains the lofty vista as the speaker communicates
his homage in the hawk-like retreat, stating: "for us, in the New World, / our older
world. you become 1 a benign, rigorous uncle'' (SG 61). Neruda's poetry is cited
for the way it opens the ear to Octavio Paz and the "sand-rasped 1 mutter of
Csar Vallejo." With the 1 s t verse a retum to lower regions occurs. Neruda's
acolyte em braces his place in the lineage in an image of Promethean suffenng:
"we were al1 netted to one rock / by vines of iron, Our livers 1 picked by corbeaux
244
own powers. The organic architecture of the poet's dwelling gives Walcott a site
for the process of imagination to center on. The "wreck" of earlier is refigured
from its ruined condition, Neruda's voice resonating in the expanded tones of
Walcott's, a 'vessel' of the lost presence.
Roach, a West Indian poet with whom he shares a possibly even stronger affinity.
becomes the subject of an elegy shaped around the idea of voice that explores
the depth of his stature. Architecture plays a centering role for memory once
again, and is used to expand metaphorically on the motifs that characterized his
work. As with Walcott, Roach, who comrnitted suicide by drowning in 1974.
sought in his poetry a combination that would hold good for West Indian culture:
a fusion of local traditions with European influence able to prove a paradigrn of a
new, hybrid sensibility. His forms, while conventional, are inhabited by "his own
West Indian voice." and articulated with "the passion of an independent
consciousness," as Chamberlin observes.43 This was also a "Civided
consciousness" on many levels, split crucially between "hope and despair." a
factor the elegy exploits. Roach's concem with the future direction of West
lndian life is expressed through architectural metaphors at one stage. A s
Chamberlin quotes, he insisted (in a trope Walcott also deploys), that West
lndians "must erect (their) own bungalow by the sea out of the full knowledge of
245
the architecture of English places and cottages."u 'The Wind in the Dooryard,"
elegy's onset. In not coming from the "tom mouth" of the "salt body." the
poem's one single line foregrounds the place the speaker's memory of Roach
from a Roach pocm. "Lcttcr io h m i n p in England," thc tcrcct: "Hcrc rs.c arc
architccts with n o tradition, 1 Arc haplcss buildcrs upon no foundation 1 No shllcd sun-cyors mark our
ron!,ard rwd." Cham bcrlin 105.
246
sounding repetition of "clean" in association wi th this example of vemacular
architecture.
Foreshadowing Achille's elegiac undenvater excursion in Omrros. Walcon
uses an old, communally integrating euphemism for Roach's death in the next
stanza: "He went swimming to Africa, / but he felt tired." In this way he "chose
1.. - 1 to reach his ancestors." References to other sources also expand the
picture.45 The refrain comes again in the fourth stanza, met with the response:
"but. doesn't the sunise / force itself through the curtain / of the trembling
invokes in his poems and the speaker must recall in turn, pain that makes his plain
styie, like the facts of history (and the death) a burden hard to bear:
While he hears "the echo of broken windmills," the nod to Don Quirote hints at
45 Notably w.hcn thc cchocs of "Whcn Lilacs h~
in thc D o o q d Bloom'd" prcscnt in thc iitlc altach [O
thc "spilling cordita" imagc. Cf. Part ihrcc: "ln thc dooryard fronting ;inold f m - h o u s c n m ihc white\vrishWdpalinp. 1 Stands thc lilac-bush trill-growinp with hcarl-shapcd Icavcs of rich grccn." Moorc. cd- 171.
247
how Roach's idealistic hopes for a revised West Indian society were dashed over
time. The images lie like ruins taken from his poem, "1 am the archipelago," where
the islands are: "Buffeted, broken by the press of tides." "(Al11 the tales come
mocking me," Roach writes, "Out o f the slave plantations where 1 grubbed / Yam
and cane."-i6 Yet the sense of desolation a l t e n with the speed of a tropical
weather change in the next stanza, as Walcott's elegy travels upwards toward
fresh pastures.
The image of the mouih that bepan the poem reappears bequeathed to a local
grnius of place: "The peasant reeks sweetly of bush, I he smells the same as his
donkey / they smell of the high, high country." He suggests Makak from
Walcon's play. Dreum on Monkey Mountain. or Sancho Panza. But in an action
reminiscent of Whitman's hermit and his Song of the "bleeding throat," he wipes
his hand across the "tobacco-stained / paling stumps of his tom mouth," and
rinsing with the "mountain dew [...] spits out pity." Walcott pursues this note
and in the final stanza returns to the framing mechanism of the dooryard:
Mixing the bitter and earthy with the sweet. the memory of Roach is transrnuted
into coralita sprigs. The sprigs grow overflowing onto the "wall" Roach "writes
of," to reiterate the earlier stanza, forming a bier, monument in kind to the living
culture of a West Indian "sweetness and light" he craved. Out of ruinous
circumstances, Roach's death is symbolically elevated from k i n g another blow
in Chambcrlin 108. Cf. Iincs from The Sorrrrfv. pocm 20. "somcthing or wcight in thc long indigo
rif'tcrnoon. / thc yam vincs tqing to hidc the supr-\vhccl's min" ( B 48).
46 Qtd.
248
inflicted on a broken land to an action with its own logic and meaning; a
dissolution into forms that spring etemal.47 Hornage to the memory is paid by
erecting a poetic architecture built on a reconciliation of Roach's %ope and
despaii' and the types of knowledge and tradition he believed held the answer
to stagnant thinking.
* * *
The reader-listener's sense of the elegy as a mediating event testing death's
power against that of art and the imagination, an architecture wherein the "vesse1
of the lost voice" can be evoked, is even more acute when the poem in question
begins Iife as a eulogy, praising the deceased. Wdcott's "R. T. S. L." turns his
self-consciousness to advantage through a reflexive troping, making for an
improvised quality, as the oratoncal aspect of voice is ironically textuaiized.
Lowell's skeletal initiais in the title are followed by a further epitaphic inscription:
( 19 17- 1977).
thirteen lines. Each one, matching an initial, anatornizes a facet of the death
rv hose reality is sym bolicaily undermined by the irnagined release of Lowell 's
translucent spirit at the poem's end. The architectural site of the church is a
constant factor in the speech, as the motif of enclosure and its breach is invoked
throughout by spatial metaphors.
In the first stanza, the speaker squares off against death: "As for that other
thing / which cornes when the eyelid is g l a z e d (SAK 36). He goes on to imagine
Lowell's demise, how "they open the heart like a shirt / to release a rage of
swallows [. ..1 the brain / is a library for worrns." Against these images he draws
attention to his own reading, equating it with the moment when "everything
became so stiff' in Lowell's passing: "so formai with ironical adieux, / organ and
choir." Wondering. "at what moment in the oration / shall 1 break down and
p~
~-~
" C f . chc clasinp fines of "Whcn Lilacs Lst in ihc Dooryard Blmrn'd" tvhich r d : "1 Ica1.c thcc thcrc in
the door-yard, blooming, rclurntng with spring." Morc, cd. 178.
249
weep," the prearranged inevitability of it ail brings an afflicted self-composure to
the proceedings. But the tone lifts with the retum of an image: "the stade of
wings / breaking from the closing cage 1 of your body." Lowell's fist relaxes,
"uncienching 1 these pigeons circling serenely / over the page." Veering sharply
away from the potentially maudlin, Waicott offen a glimpse of transformation.
Lowell's f o m 'breaks' in these metaphors, a passage figuratively imagined in
the final stanza. The evacuation of spirit is troped as a form of translation:
and,
as the parentheses lock like a gate
1917 to 1977,
the semicircles close to form a face,
a world, a wholeness,
an unbreakable O,
and something that once had a fearful name
walks frorn the thing that used to wear its name,
transparent. exact representative,
s o that we can see through it
churches, cars, sunlight,
and the Boston Common,
not needing any book. (SAK 37)
Ctosure of the "parentheses" brings about a reformation, a hieroglyph shaped in
the -'unbreakable" guise of an "0"that is the correlative of Lowell's voice, an
Orphic mouth still singing, enthralled. Walcott envisages Lowell's spirit leaving
his form as a prmal logos. wherein signifier and signified are reunited in "exact"
250
The city of Boston will not change for your sake. (M 45)
Allusions to Walcott's discornfort in America and hankenng for the Caribbean
can be read here. Both a self-reference and a cal1 to the Lowell who will not
retum, "your head" is ambiguous, as the "tins" are finally anonymous vessels of
the Orphic voice. "Cal's bulk haunts my classes," he States, and as in "R. T. S.
L." an anatomization takes place as his "shaggy, square head" and his hmds are
re-imagined: "repeatedly bracketing vases / of air."48This shaping implies a formmaking impulse, but Loweil's head with its "petal-soft voice that has never
wilted" is given the primary Orphic significance at this juncture. The head revisits
sites through imagery borrowed from such poems as "For the Union Dead,"
"Skunk Hour," and ''The Opposite House." Police car lights keep a "red eye on
colored neighborhoods." The speaker's revene retains a mythical dimension:
on a broader poetic lineage is apparent in subtext. While Lowell may haunt his
"classes,' he maintains his own relation to the Orphic ideal of voice as well.
face:
Those grooves in that forehead of sand-colored flesh
were cut by declining keels, and the crow's foot
that prints an asterisk by unburied men
reminds him how many more by the Scamander's
gravel fell and lie waiting for their second fate.
Who next should pull his sword free of its mesh
of weeds and harnmer at the shield
of language till the wound and the word fit? (M 46)
The speaker imagines Fitzgerald's forehead becoming emblematic through his
reading of Homer, the travails of his art printed on a face that has itself become
translated, to become the poetry. Portraying him as a Vulcan-like craftsman whose
ski11 as a rnaker has cleared the field of challengers, Walcott generates a sense that
he is troping the "shield" of Fitzgerald's face ekphrastically. The next line, "A
whole war is fought backward to its cause," reinforces this enigmatic notion. As
252
"dictionary" as a temple of his translator's art.49 With this monumental
architectural signifier Walcott depicts an entry into translation as a ternporally
orientated process. animated by Fitzgerald's spirit. The war over. Walcott sets
tirne flowing fonvard, as his "pulse" locks into a scansion steering toward a New
World. The "wake" becomes a metaphor for a voice that has tumed "American"
in cadence, though his Virgilian strain survives the move. Given the knowledge
that Fitzgerald passed away a year after Midsumnier was published. this textual
afterlife is made coincident with the translator's mortal crossing over into a finaily
timeless empire.
The face becomes a means of approaching and memorializing voice in
with Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" arise as the homage is aiso a type of
imitation. Like Auden, Walcott employs three parts. relying often on six-liners and
quatrains.51 However, what first distinguishes the poem from Auden's and links it
with the Lowe11 eulogy is the self-assured reflexivity of the speaker apparent from
the opening lines. catching those gathered within the cathedra1 into his tones:
Assuredly, that fissured face
is wincing deeply, and must loathe
our solemn rubbish,
frown on our canonizing farce
as self-enhancing, in Iines both
devout and snobbish.
Yet it may spare us who convene
against its wish in varnished pews
this autumn evening;
as maps remember countries, mien
defines a man, and his appears
at our beseeching. (AT61)
Troy to Fiwgcrald. \Y hich rccounts thc s t o of
~ thc
~voundcdPhilcxtctcs strididcd on Lcrnnos \\.hile thc sicgc of Troy mndudcs. Scc Scamus H~rinc>~.
Tlie Citre
af Troy: A Version of Sopltocles ' Phi locktcs (Ncw York: Nmnday. 1991).
"0 Appcndcd n i t h thc words: " R d rit thc Cathcdnl of St.John thc Divinc. Ncn. York, Octobcr 17, 1983."
5 1 Thc corn parison is less surc in parts onc and two. A udcn's first pan consists of four sis-lincrs. onc fivcliner and ri single couplet rclrain, comparai to Walcoti's cight six-lincrs. His sccwnd part is madc up of onc
tcn-lincr, Walott's ninc quatrains. Hou.cvcr, both third parts comprise sis quatrains.
253
The "wry mouth bracketed with pain" suggests a textualizing process in motion,
the housing of Auden's visage in ordered paeans exemplified in Walcott's own
voicing:
For further voices will delight
in al1 that left the body of
the mortal Auden
centuries after candlelit
Kirchstetten freed its tenant of
Tirne and its burden
Modifying Auden's words in the guts of his own living form. Walcon equates the
dead man's body with the cottage in Kirchstetten, which now figures for the
corpus of his poetry in its deserted architecture: the museum that preserves
memory in the textual echo of voice. Auden's presence takes shape as a shade
the moumers are then asked to reflect upon. as "stricken with the light I of his
strange calling" they contemplate their own individuai fates in the wake of the
death (AT62).The speaker projects an imagined scenario: "once we leave this
darkened church / and stand on pavements in the night [...] and move on / to
sel fish futures.'' Auden's form ghosts those who were once followen: "our
254
footsteps echoing in the dark / street have, for their cornpanion, / his shadow with
us." lmplying a poetic force as well, the shade is figured benignly marking the
within. the power of form associated with him is preserved in the cell of the self. A
current that must not be permitted to fail, the voice is kept alive in the inner
sanctum of the elect, reflecting the process outlined in the concise 'wires' of
Walcott's elegiac architecture.
Walcott takes a less defensive angle in his second part, though an allusion to
possessing Auden's poetry through English is made. Formally. his quatrains
continue to frame Auden's memory in a befitting manner as a shift in setting to
the West Indies is made. In keeping with the opening image, the speaker imagines
a face once again changing, like a beach, as the "fissures made by speech / close"
(AT 62-63). He envisages how "Geese following earth's arc / will find an
255
Auden envisions poetry as a river that "flows on south [. .. it survives, I A way of
happening, a mouth," here the West Indies figure for such a destination.53 The
birds symbolize not only the migratory flow of poetries, but in a broader sense.
Ianguage. The speaker refers to "conjugations" made over, yet "still based on
the beat / of wings that gave their cast to / our cuneiform alphabet." Walcottos
overarching trajectory of poetic thought extends from the New York cathedral to
another architectural space. He rernembers the Methodist chape1 in Castries, from
which flowed, "down still colonial streets, I the hoisted chords of Wesley." These
"chords," in an image of a well k i n g drawn, "were strong as miner3 throats,"
and define this site where he made his first "communion 1.. .1 with the English
"Empire.
..
casts the analogous part of Auden's elegy for Yeats. Where Auden imagines
Yeats laid to rest, the "Irish vesse1 [. ..1 Emptied of its poetry." here the speaker
presents his shade f i n t absorbed into New York's architecture and then freed:
Twilight. Grey pigeons batten
on St. Mark's date. A face
s t a d e s us with its pattern
of sunlit fire escapes.
Your slippered shadow pities
the railings where it moves,
brightening w ith Nunc Dintittis
53 A udcn 148.
256
speaker rnakes three demands. He first implores: ' 0 craft, that strangely chooses 1
one mouth to speak for all." Walcott's conception of the "vesse1 of 1.. - 1 voice"
carrying others onward is reiterated. The next plea: "O Light no dark refuses,"
opens up a correspondence with divine spirit, and form, whose etymology is
related to sparkling or gleaming (as noted in the introduction). A third appeal is
made: "O Space impenetrable, // fix, among constellations, I the spark we honour
here." The collective entreaty to these aspects-"craft [. .- 1 Light [ ..- 1 Spaceq'marks a relexive invocation to poetic form's enshrinement of memory, and the
gearing of Walcott's own language towards an enduring temporal permanence.
The closing image continues the migrating ''craft" motif. a figure for poiesis and a
vision of a funeral barge moving down the East River. The "mouths of al1 the
rivers 1 are still," in homage, while the "estuaries / shine with the wake that gives
the / craftsman the gift of peace" ( A T M ) .In lines seeking the serene lync
moment of 'still motion' Walcott's final quatrains hold Auden's image in the act
of release. fixing his charged "spark in the poetic firmament. A mastery over
time is asserted, for which the architectural setting has created the conditions.
The homage to Stephen Spender, "Elsewhere." is composed in longer lined
elegiac quatrains, which begin rhyming abab, then gradually move into more
cornplex variations. Again Walcott reflexively tropes his own form as part of the
intemal imagery, collapsing aesthetic distance in a single poetic architecture.
257
Throughout the poem a dislocated "Somewhere" is invoked. Auden's "arbitrary
spot" from ' T h e Shield of Achilles." is recalled.54The f i a t of the ten quatrains
invokes the "Barbed wire enclosed" space from that poem: "Somewhere a white
horse gallops with its mane / plunging round a field whose sticks / are ringed with
barbed wire" (AT66).The speaker States in the fourth quatrain: "Somewhere a
page / is tom out. and somehow the foliage / no longer looks Iike leaves but
camouflage." A gradua1 narrowing in on a confined architectural space occurs, as
this textual analogy provokes an image of "a writer lying with his eyes wide
open / on mattress ticking. who will not read I this, or write. How to make a pen?"
Dystopic images of a world where censorship is the n o m ensue, before an
irruption of the prison cefl imagery into the f o m itself takes place:
Through these black bars
hollowed faces stare. Fingen
grip the cross bars of these stanzas
and it is here, because somewhere else
their stares fog into oblivion
thinly, Iike the faceiess numbers
that bewilder you in your telephone
diary. Li ke 1 s t year's massacres. (AT 67)
Making his lines and quatrains the "black [. .. 1 cross bars" that represent cells
and their windows, the framing imagery combines the spaces of 'elsewhere' and
'somewhere' inside one inherent f o m : "it is here." This internment, though
Walcon's self-reflexive engagement with his own text as a place where the
'4 A udcn
597.
258
"vesse1 of the lost voice" is re-imagined in a formai architecture is apparent in his
"Italian Eclogues" for Joseph Brodsky.55 This six-paem sequence from The
Bouny. each consisting of a nonce stanza of between twenty and twenty-five
extended lines, uses the p e t ' s love for Rome and Venice to order his memory in a
senes of topoi. Walcott also cames Brodsky's spirit across to the West Indies.
Eclogue i opens with the speaker traveling:
Mantua" ( B 64). When the elegy first appeared two paintings of houses by
Walcott accompanied it, evoking the "stone fanns in character" the speaker
passes as he drives.36 Brodsky's lines and images are re-read into the landscape,
giving voice to surrounds imbued with the words of earlier poets:
in Italy. / Yeah. Very still." Mixed with such drollery is an appreciation for the
architectonic achievement: "To every line there is a time and a season. / You
refreshed f o m s and stanzas." Brodsky's reverence for poetry's raw materials
leads Walcott to equate him with a natural force impacting upon the tenain.
As in the eulogy for Auden, architectural elements are rnerged with the shade
7-8.
Italy, stating in an interview that he fears falling too in love with the country.
Thus he can picture Brodsky's shade patiently waiting for him in a celestial city
of his own imagining, framed in the permanence of these lines. Through spatial
imagery, Walcott asserts a control over the temporal within the visionary realm of
his elegy.
Eclogue iii moves into the ltalian countryside again, a "landscape of vines
and hills." though Brodsky's original homeland is simultaneously called up. The
260
(B 66). In the fourih eclogue the relentlessly poetic landscape shifts to the
seacoast and a translation of voices into natural phenornena returns. Moniale is
muttered by the "foam out on the sparkling strait," while Brodsky's "echo
cornes between the rocks. chuckling in fissures 1 when the high surf vanishes" ( B
67). A catalogue uniting the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas is reflexively paid
out: "These lines flung for sprats o r a catch of rainbow fishes, / the scarlet
snapper, parrot fish, argentine mullet, I and the universal rank srnell of poetry,
cobalt sea." Poetic sustenance is harvested in Walcott's imagining, as the speaker
inhales:
weeds like hair swaying in water, mica in Sicily,
a smell older and fresher than the Norman cathedrals
or restored aqueducts, the raw hands of fishermen
their anchor of dialect, and phrases drying on walls
based in moss. These are its origins, verse, they remain
with the repeated lines of waves and their crests. oars
and scansion, flocks and one horizon, boats with keels
wedged into sand, your own island or Quasimodo's
or Montale's lines wriggling like a basket of eels.
Poetry is animated from a fisherman's metaphoncal perspective, the ceaseless
quasi-musical rhythms of work held up against the "cathedrals" and "restored
aqueducts" as paradoxically "older and fresher." Again, the architectural
emphasis is necessary to give Walcotf s temporal evocation of the dynamic and
classic -'ongins" of verse a deeper coniext37
ivy, along with the berries of fruit Walcon plucks once more. These pastoral
echoes corne through the resonant, arched "colonnade" also sounded by the
ocean. making the elegiac form here the organic correlative to Brodsky's
to ocean. tradition and Brodsky's voice. It acts as a springboard for the next
restorative endeavour: "1 am Iifted above the surf's missal, the columned cedars, 1
to look down on rny digit of sorrow, your stone." In the sacrosanct construct of
the poem, the speaker can become an eagle bearing the "acorn" of the poet's
heart. "towards Russia
1.. . 1 that restores / you past the Bfack Sea of Publius Naso
/ to the roots of a beech tree." The power for this imaginative flight is attributable
to a sublirnity of voice he draws from Brodsky: "I am Iifted with grief and praise.
so / that your speck widens with elation, a dot that soars." The mortal full-stop
that ended the life is spatialized metaphorically by Walcon to become a building,
part of the "echoing architecture" which is Brodsky's legacy; a projection of
262
spirit borrowed from the title of his last collection. So Forilz, to suggest an eternal
ellipsis. As in Heaney's elegies which end this way, a temporal opening-out
The references to cedars in the fifth eclogue rnay have a further purpose in
giving Walcott's sequence a West Indian flavor. In the closing poem conifers are
evoked, and more architectural rnetaphon appear: '*The vault / increases, its
ceiling crossed by bats or swallows I the heart climbs lilac hills in the light's
declension" (B 69).The speaker watches a figure like himself, "a man nearing his
own house./ The trees close their doors. and the surf demands attention."
Marvell's "Bermudas." with its paradisal Lebanese cedars, is echoed in Walcott's
overall theme, and contains a similar "vault" image:
'And in these rocks for us did frame
A Temple, where to sound his name.
through as a pantheistic spirit in Walcott's version, filling the St. Lucian skies:
The lion
of the headland darkens Iike St. Mark's, metaphors
breed and flit in the cave of the mind, and one hears
in the waves' incantation and the August conifers,
and reads the omate cyrillics of gesiunng fronds
as the silent council of cumuli begins convening
over an Atlantic whose light is as calrn as a pond3
and larnps bud like fruit in the village, above roofs, and the hive
of constellations appears, evening after evening,
your voice, through the dark reeds of lines that shine with life.59
263
bees) as a primordial "vault," expanded infinitely. Brodsky's voice is made the
daimon of this temple Walcott builds in the hearing, as the girding forces of form
order his memory amid the "occluded sanctities" of these, his "accurate Indies."
Like Heaney, Walcon looks to eariier poems-by Whitman. Milton, Dante and
Marvell-as a means of strengthening the range of associations present in his
elegiac architecture. A concentration on "hypnotiz[ingl space*' is also apparent,
in order that historicd and temporal issues can be raised. The architectural acts as
a frequent site where an entry into other, imaginative reaiities is made. Past and
present are brought into visionary contact with one another, as in "A Village
Life" and "The Cenient Phoenix" As he writes of Frost: 'The poem does not
obey linear time; [. ..] it is, when it is true, time's conqueror, not time's servant."eo
The intenvoven process of memory is a constant factor in Walcott's elegies,
eulogies, and homages. While a complex melancholy pervades many of his lyrics,
the elegies prove generally consolatory in the final passage they work out,
converting despair to a commemorative faith in renewal. When the focus moves
away from actual people to dwell on issues of historical injustice, neo-colonialism
and the rise of 'brutal' architectural tendencies in the West Indies-as in "Elegy"
and the Frederiksted poems-his ability to imagine a way fonvard is Iess sure.
There is a sense that Walcott identifies with the structural forms he defends, in the
same way he sees himself as a keeper of the faith in his laments for maken such as
Lowell, Auden and Brodsky. He draws those voices and forms into a Caribbean
context in many cases, creating hybrids where memory and tradition (the pastoral
elegiac. for example) intenect, and through the poem, an architectonic conception
of the "lost voice" is extended to a whole, 'vaulted' world in the imagination.
264
States: "The tnie p e t [. ..1 employs scheme as trope [...] Great poetry is always
making a kind of parable of its forma1 stnictures."6i In the elegiac architecture of
Heaney and Walcott. a strong aspect of this "parable" quaiity is realized. Both
poets stretch the confines of their chosen f o m s at various points, implying that a
travel beyond these limits is commensurate with death as perpetual release. In a
process that frequently appears to bear out Vico's formulation of memory, a
reorientation of perspective often follows on from the work of remembrance,
imagination or imitation, and invention in their elegies. They often trope a
dynamic 'passage' that structures the reader-listener's encounter with the
memory of the departed. This follows from the way Heaney and Walcott create
spatial and architectural topoi in regard to various individuals. giving their
representations a vibrant quaiity, particularly with regard to voice. These places
are 'built on' in the imagination of each p e t , and in the language of their elegies,
as a way of engaging with time and memory. In the process, memory gives poetry
a transformational power to build a lasting monument, changing the place of
mourning into one of restoration. The elegies of Heaney and Walcott move to
nddle our preconceptions of death inside imaginary architectural and spatial
Concl usion
Throughout the course of this thesis 1 stress how architecture is central to the
way Heaney and Walcott not only conceptualize poetry, but to the imaginative
process of many poems. Each regards architecture and poetry as made up of
resonant fonns that are ideaily animated, rather than static in nature. When
represented in the poetic language of Heaney and Walcott the architecturai
ultimately takes on a spatio-temporal depth and power of suggestion. They
repeatedly shift from the spatial dimension to the temporal realm to explore the
possibilities latent in history and memory. The architectural provides the centenng
place, the formative topos. from which the process begins.
In chapter one 1 outline how Heaney's and Walcott's use of architecture as a
266
Mandelstam: "Everything-the Russian earth, the European li terary tradition. the
Stalin terror-had to cohere in an act of the poetic voice" (P 2 18). The
assertiveness that establishing poetic voice requires creates a metaphoricai link
with originary architectural f o m s , as seen in the examples of the tower, cave. and
church. Over-identifying voice with the "perfected form" may prove dangerous,
however, as Heaney observes in Yeats's case. Walcott, while less wary of this
phenomenon. sees poetry as creating an inevitable enclosure for the wnter which
equates to dwelling in the world. The idea of objects as "temples of the spirit"
also becomes apparent in this chapter, a notion each poet extends into broader
spatial realms. as reading architecture emerges as a means of temporal engagement
frequently involving a dislocation from quotidian reality.
In chapter two 1 examine how Heaney and Waicott each re-imagine home as
a point of departure for a figurative dwelling in poetry, maintaining an ambivalent
view toward the architecture of Ireland and the West Indies respectively. The
aiienation from constraining forms is camed over into a sense of restless
movement through the world. Iain Chambers speaks of this experience in more
general tenns. as a "mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were
fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an
opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the
languages that constitute our sense of identity. place and belonging."i In the
case of Heaney and Walcott, the poet often acts as a "questioning presence" as
well. entering into the imaginary life evoked by specific architectural places and
sites. The 'ghosted forms' of home often recall buried histories, evoking matters
267
personae-able to slip between realities, and defy the constraints of space and
time-are the outriders of imagination. Haunting the places of home, however,
always involves a reciprocal haunting, whether it be associated with the 'house
of fear' in Orneros. the mind's ce11 in "Retum to D'Ennery, Rain," or the bleak,
seaing of "A Northern Hoard." In the poems 1 examine, Heaney and Walcon
often use alrnost Gothic imagery as minds become blackened vaults, barns l w m
with unnameable dread, and architecture becomes associated with an oppression
of the soul. Part of the 'inbetween' status they evoke in their poetic personae
houses and estates. These topoi focus the imaginations of Heancy and Walcott to
different degrees. Wdcott, in particular, reveals a complex attitude toward the
Great House and its legacy. The "questioning presence" of each poet is once
more discemible in their awareness of the often violent and historically traumatic
memories associated with different sites. They often expose dark and enigmatic
centers. as architecture acts as an imaginative 'door' into other temporalities.
Aspects of visionary immersion, or reverie, are cornmon in these poems. Alongside
the tower, each p e t invokes archetypal architectural structures-the bone-house.
Mycenae fonress, the coral 'kingdom,' the slave-hold-and these represent prima1
ongins and sources. In a Jungian sense, they are images of influentid '"energy
268
centers"' with connections to the collective unconscious.2 Heaney extends the
search for beginnings into language itself through various words, looking to
summon their energies. while Walcon. at times, treats the Great House as a
symbolic wellhead of possibility.
In the final chapter 1 explore how architecture and memory are inextricably
linked in the elegies of Heaney and Walcon, a factor relevant to their homages,
and the eulogy. Through their various personae, they each continue to assert a
fluid motion between realities within the imaginary reaim of each poem. In
Walcott's poetry the voice strongly emerges as a cipher for the spirit regarding
the lament and celebration of pets. Heaney also makes an association between
voice and certain architectural places and sites as vestigial memory. The concem
with absence, as Maurice Blanchot writes of Rilke. is frequently countered by the
lines as well: 'There is not one thing in which 1 do not find myself;/ It is not my
voice alone that sings: everything resonates." In several cases, each poet
mimetically gestures at the idea of a poetic architecture, but at a deeper level the
fonnal fusion of imagery and structure becornes a way of engaging time and
3 Mauricc Blanchot, "Rilkc and Dcath's Dernanti." *TifteS p c e of li~eratrrre.uans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U
269
might look in more detail at some of the specific issues raised in this thesis. How
architecture informs each wnter's thought about language, poetics, and politics is
an ongoing source of concern, due to the cornplexity of elements present in their
work. The connection of each poet with the respective histories of representing
architecture and the landscape in their cultures, discussed in chapter three. also
offen scope for further inquiry. Other studies might concentrate in more detail on
those structures and sites that appear with less frequency in the poetry than many
of the recurrent features 1 examine. In Heaney's case, these would include such
ancient places as the rath o r hill-fort, and the vernacular architecture of lookout
and 'listening-pst.' In regard to Walcott, places such as the plantation yard, and
the various forts left by the British and French o n St. Lucia and other islands
(especially in Onieros),carry a powerful significance. These examples conceal
'other' hidden histones for Heaney and Walcott as well. The recurrent usage of
hotel imagery in Walcott's work. and his relationship to different cities, would
benefit from further interpretative analysis. Throughout Heaney's and Walcoa's
poetry and poetics. references to confinement and prisons appear.5 Investigation
into the sources of this preoccupation, and the prevalence of the 'spatial
uncanny' in their writing might yield interesting results. Finally, a more extensive
comparative analysis of the clescencus ad inferos motif in the poetry, along the
lines laid down by Pike, would undoubtedly prove valuable in critical terms.
There is much scope for further inquiry.
143.
270
seventies. The Center is modeled closely on the human ear. Lying flat on the
terrain, its curvilinear form creates an entrance to the labyrinth of caves beneath.
As John Olley writes, "it first channels the visitors into a kind of acoustic
chamber-the reception and tea-room-before conducting them down the
narrowing cochlear passage to the cavities beneath the cranium of the
rnountain."6 The exterior of the structure is clad in the same limestone as the
deeply fissured hillside. seeming to grow organically out of the earth. lnspired by
Neoli thic passage graves, the structure could have been designed by Heaney, and
i t is intriguing to think how he would read its form, and enter into the 'underlife'
discerned there. Walcott, on the other hand. might see how the center also
resembles a nautilus shell, sounded by voices, returning their echoes, "listening to
the landscape." For Heaney and Walcott. many architectural structures are
"listening posts," resonating to inform the imaginative process, and conducive to
the temporal orientation which ail poetic language involves. The Center
epitomizes the argument of this thesis: how each poet metaphoncally puts his ear
to the grounds of history and memory. sounding creative possibilities through the
John Olic\., "Ail\vcc Cavcs Visilors' Ccntrc." Bcckcr. ct al. cds. 152.
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